Re: ignoring control characters in character width

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2023 02:51:47 +0100
> 
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2023 at 09:16:47PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > I think I understand what you don't understand, actually this is not
> > about displaying the characters, which is not really done by texi2any,
> > it is about situations where we need to count the width of characters
> > in texi2any.  For instance, this is to determine when to put end of
> > lines when formatting Info to compare with line width, or to format
> > multitable cells, or to determine the length of underlining * for a
> > heading string as in 
> > 
> > Some heading
> > ************
> > 
> > Hope that it is clearer.
> 
> It would be wrong to output control characters in Info output.  It doesn't
> matter what the program does in this situation as it would mean that
> something wrong is happening somewhere else, e.g. malformed input.  Worrying
> about what we should do for vertical tabs or form feeds is a waste of time
> in my opinion.
> 
> So it doesn't matter what width is used for these characters, so we
> should do whatever is simplest in this part of the code.  Using 0 for
> the width seems as good as any choice.

Well, if you say that we should never-ever display these characters,
then obviously zero is a good value.

But is it really true that we never display any of them?  Not even
TAB?