Re: On the masking of undisplayable characters

[Artur Malabarba]

> It should happen only with quotes, and presumably only in
> documentation-related buffers.  The rationale is that we cannot afford
> showing illegible documentation to users just because their terminal
> is incapable of displaying these important characters.
>
> I suggested to limit this to windows showing *Help* buffers, but it
> was decided to wait until someone complains.

I would be much more confortable if this only turned on by default in
buffers where we _know_ that's ok, such as *help* buffers, info
buffers, and maybe Emacs sources.
What bothers me is that it'll happen on any buffer without
confirmation or notification.

Let's say the user is reading some code designed to read a stream and
do something with quotation marks. Or maybe the user is reading prose
in a context where typography is important.
Usually they'll have a font to display these round quotations, but if
they start emacs without a graphical frame for one reason or another
(or, god forbid, they've misconfigured something) then it would a
problem that they see " when they actually have “ or ”.

Now, those are not very likely scenarios, that's why it bothers me a
little less if it's just quotation marks. But I wanted to make sure
we're aware of this, specially if this feature starts spreading to
other characters.

> Not really: the display engine doesn't examine any of those
> characters, until they are on or very near to the visible portion of
> the buffer.

Yeah, I see how that would be complicated.

I guess I'll just step down from soap box now.