RE: Quick survey of Apple symbol fonts (in context of the Wingding/Webding proposal)

Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

>> 1. Graphic symbols for control characters are needed so writers can write about the control characters themselves using plain text.
>
> This does not seem so unreasonable. The RTL and LTR overrides *function* on the text when inserted into text. So you can't use those with glyphs in a font to represent for example the UCS dotted-boxes-with-letters, because they are control characters and will affect the text.

Do people really need assigned characters (not just glyphs) to represent
these things, instead of just talking about them? I see text all the
time that refers to characters using the name of the character, or its
U+ value, or some informal name or descriptive phrase like "the RTL and
LTR overrides." How common is the need to have a discrete character to
talk about another character?

>> I don't think there's any end to where this can go. As Martin said, eventually you'd need a meta-meta-character to talk about the meta-character, and then it's not just a size problem, but an infinite-looping problem.
>
> I do not follow the logic of this assertion. SPACE and SYMBOL FOR SPACE exist. No infinite recursion is needed.

How do I talk about U+2420 SYMBOL FOR SPACE in plain text? Other than
the way I just did, I mean.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­