OverStrike control character

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 23:18:23 +0200
Kent Karlsson via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> So yes, GCC is (or rather: was) intended for overtyping (among other
> things...), exemplified by composing a ”not equal to” symbol. Unicode
> does that particular example in a different way of course. While I do
> think much of ECMA-48 does have a future (ever used a terminal
> emulator?), I don’t think GCC has a future… Nor the interpretation of
> BS exemplified above… Nor an ”OVERSTRIKE” control character...

I suspect terminal emulators still need to handle GCC.  Years ago,
underlining in man pages used to be presented by overstriking letters
with an underscore.  It was a major pain when copying a man page to
another medium, or even a video terminal that didn't understand the
convention.  Nowadays, the output is tailored to the destination, so
piping through od -c doesn't reveal how underlining is achieved in
more modern systems.  (However, 20 year old Unix boxes are still
being used with their original operating systems, and rlogin and its
analogues are still in use.)

I could be wrong.  The emacs shell window doesn't (27.0.50) handle man
page underlining, and I assume it's not enough of an irritant to get
fixed.  GCC is seriously inconsistent with context-sensitive layout. 

Richard.