OverStrike control character

David Starner prosfilaes at gmail.com
Sat Jun 20 05:30:22 CDT 2020


You can use BS; you can use GCC; there are apparently ESC sequences
that will do it, and you could implement it in any number of ways in
rich text. They don't work right now; if you need this functionality,
you're going to need to implement it. It doesn't feel that you want a
way to store and display overtyped text, it feels that you want
Unicode to officially support it. It's a very complex and expensive
expansion, but if a bunch of people were using overtyped text, this
discussion might be going differently.

This seems to be the quintessential example of a feature that has very
marginal use and would be rather complex to implement. The fact that
back in the days of daisy-wheel printers, this was used, often to get
characters not otherwise supported, like the cent sign, and when the
daisy-wheel printer disappeared, so did any support for such a thing.
It's like playing games with character cell fonts to support stuff
like a mouse cursor. It's history, and history not particularly easy
to support in Unicode.

There were just recently a bunch of characters encoded to support old
8-bit machines, because that was easy. But the associated inverted
characters were rejected, and the submitters told to use some higher
level protocol to support them. That seems to be a comparable reaction
to what you're getting.

-- 
The standard is written in English . If you have trouble understanding
a particular section, read it again and again and again . . . Sit up
straight. Eat your vegetables. Do not mumble. -- _Pascal_, ISO 7185
(1991)


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