Re: Entering Unicode characters

[Alexis]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> > Waiting to see what you display for white and black 
> > snowman.. :)
>
> I don't think I have ever seen that character -- I don't know 
> what it looks like.

My guess is that, in response to you wondering:

> Could this use that to show something meaningful, for characters 
> that can't really display?  For instance, a sequence of 2 or 3 
> characters that somehow stands for the real character? 

> For instance, the sequence << could stand for «, and the 
> sequence i-. could stand for dotless i. 

John might have been referring to the large swathes of Unicode 
that don't necessarily have an 'obvious' representation in such a 
form. For example:

* CJK-related characters;
* the "Musical symbols" characters;
* many of the "Miscellaneous symbols" characters.

Additionally, there are lots of opportunities for bikeshedding 
over the representations of certain characters. Take ☺, WHITE 
SMILING FACE. Off the top of my head, i can imagine that being 
represented by ':-)', but i frequently encounter people using ':)' 
and '(-:' to represent the 'smiling face' concept instead.

Together, these issues seem to me to suggest that it might be 
non-trivial to attempt to build a table of ASCII representations 
of various Unicode characters. 


Alexis.