Re: WORD JOINER vs ZWNBSP

Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug dot org> wrote:

>> On my netbook, which is running Windows 7 Starter, U+2060 is not a
>> part of any of the shipped fonts.
>
> It is a control character, it does not need to have a glyph in the
> font to be properly supported.

The problem is the word "supported." Marcel is seeing a visible glyph (a
.notdef box) for what is supposed to be an invisible, zero-width
character, and that is leading him to conclude that Windows doesn't
"support" this character.

On my Win 7 machine at work, when I enter the string "one⁠two"
("one\u2060two") and click on either word, both words are selected. That
is exactly what I would expect WJ to do. This works on the built-in
Notepad as well as Notepad++ and BabelPad (but not on GoDaddy's
Web-based email client).

But out of more than 500 fonts on that machine, the only stock Microsoft
fonts that show WJ with zero-width, instead of a .notdef glyph, are
Javanese Text, Myanmar Text, and Segoe UI Symbol. So while it's
inaccurate to extrapolate this to "Microsoft doesn't support WJ," the
font support is definitely lacking.

The bit about characters being converted to other characters, of course,
has nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with particular
applications.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸