OverStrike control character

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Sat Jun 20 19:44:39 CDT 2020


James Kass wrote:

> So anyone seriously considering floating a proposal for an overstrike
> mechanism in Unicode would be well advised to establish contact with
> potential users to determine whether such a mechanism would see any
> actual use.

When we proposed the "bunch of characters encoded to support old 8-bit machines" that David Starner referred to, being able to cite assurance from actual end users that they would use these characters was not just a good idea; it was essential to getting the characters encoded. (Since then, we have learned of many times more users who plan to use them, or are already using them, than we knew about at the time.)

Neither Yeoman nor any other coin catalog would use intentionally print, say, an 8 over a 7 in a listing for an overdate. They might do so in rich text (i.e. a published book) to illustrate, for novice collectors, what is meant by an overdate; but that could be done just as well, and usually is, with a greatly magnified picture of the coin in question. So I don't think it can be said that numismatists have a "need" for overstriking in plain text.

It seems the only serious use case for this character (as opposed to "it would be fun" or "it would be possible" or "Unicode has lots of empty code points, and look at the stuff they've already encoded") is that people could make up their own characters — so long as they consisted of two or more existing glyphs, one overstruck on the other — and they would have a non-PUA Unicode representation. Is that about the size of it?

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org





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