Question mark

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:26:37 -0400
> Cc: "unicode at corp.unicode.org" <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
> From: Erik Carvalhal Miller via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
> 
> On Monday, June 10, 2024, Harriet Riddle via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> ＞ 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.
> 
> If oneʼs going to go so far as to use the glottal stop as a substitute, one might as well decorate it with U+0323
> COMBINING DOT BELOW: ⟨ʔ̣⟩.  Do it wrong right!
> 
> Then of course there are the dingbats: U+2753 BLACK QUESTION MARK ORNAMENT ⟨❓⟩ and U+2754
> WHITE QUESTION MARK ORNAMENT ⟨❔⟩.  Even when given non‐emojified appearance as with U+FE0E
> VARIATION SELECTOR-15, they may be too heavy, but suitability ultimately depends on oneʼs particular use
> case and oneʼs taste.
> 
> The user might also find U+2047 DOUBLE QUESTION MARK ⟨⁇⟩ helpful; depending on context, U+2048
> QUESTION EXCLAMATION MARK ⟨⁈⟩ and U+2049 EXCLAMATION QUESTION MARK ⟨⁉⟩ (both also subject
> to non‐emojification) could also be useful. Note that all three invoke the normalization concerns raised by Phil
> Smith III.

If this is about file names on MS-Windows, then there's another
consideration to take into account: it might be unusually hard to name
files by names that include exotic characters, if those characters are
not supported by the current system codepage.  For example, typing
such names into the Windows terminal window might be cumbersome if not
impossible, and the terminal's font might not support them.  Worse,
some programs might not be able to access such files at all.

UTF-8 support is still in beta even on newest Windows versions, and
programs we are used to using are largely not adapted to that yet.  So
caveat emptor.

> My usual solution: leave out the question marks altogether.

That's not always the user's choice, as we all know.