• perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Fun fact: attempting to use an “old style” bitmap block-graphics font will make you notice one or two characters that are no longer usable in modern text display systems (e.g. word processors or browsers);

    • non breaking space
    • soft hyphen
    • robinm@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      I have a non-breaking space on my layout since 10 years, and a friend recently added a non-breaking hyphen to his. Appart from search that doesn’t do automatic conversion I didn’t noticed issues.

      • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        iirc, the issue wasn’t so much SHY being used for its intended purpose, as byte 0xAD no longer being available for use as a normal character.

        Imagine getting a game map file from the 80s in which lots of (more than 224) characters were used as block graphics, and you have a matching font. You open the “text” file with the appropriate font, and notice gaps in what should be a grid because all of the 0xAD are missing.

        Effectively ISO-8859 and similar have become so common that it’s really hard to convince any modern system to treat “text” bytes as not following some standard in which the 0xAD becomes non-printable.