Question mark

[Harriet Riddle]

The ASCII question mark, which is the one used as a shell wildcard and which isn't supported in filenames on some operating systems, is U+003F ? QUESTION MARK.

Unicode has a couple more instances of the same symbol: U+FE56 ﹖ SMALL QUESTION MARK is the question mark for *horizontal* text from Big5—while, U+FF1F ？ FULLWIDTH QUESTION MARK is the question mark for *vertical* text from Big5, unified with the question marks from JIS X 0208, GB 2312 and (what was at the time called) KS C 5601.  These exist in Unicode for round-trip compatibility with EUC-CN (i.e. the IANA's "GB2312"), Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, ISO-2022-JP, mixed ASCII/Big5, and other encodings which combine those double-byte coded character sets with ASCII or modified ASCII.

It seems unnecessary for Unicode to add more duplicate question marks besides those ones (my personal inclination would be to use U+FE56).

For the sake of completeness, U+0294 ʔ LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP looks similar, but not actually a question mark, unlike U+FE56 or U+FF1F.

(I'm not 100% sure which "ugly, unattractive symbols" you are referring to but, if any of the other characters mentioned above look less attractive than the ASCII one, that's determined more by the font than by Unicode itself; adding yet another Unicode character (which will, at first, not be present in *any* existing font) would not help there.)

—Har.

________________________________________
From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> on behalf of Юрий Бэкап via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Sent: 10 June 2024 08:00
To: unicode at corp.unicode.org <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Subject: Question mark
 
Hello! I've been wondering about the following question for a long time: how difficult and how feasible is it to add a question mark to the Unicode table that would be identical to the regular question mark but usable in Windows operating systems? Almost all characters prohibited in Windows OS have their equivalents in the Unicode table, allowing the use of characters like "/", "", ":", etc.
However, there is no proper equivalent for the question mark. All the available options in the table are ugly, unattractive symbols that are inconvenient to use.