Subject: Re: bug#6860: allow user to see harbored smuggled fugitive LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK hiding in his files

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:54:38 +0800

OK thank you. It appears what I need to do is
(aset standard-display-table ?‎ (vconcat "♥"))
However just sticking that into one's .emacs file will cause
an error and when one uses --debug-init all one will find out is
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument arrayp nil)
with no hint of what line that error is on (thus --debug-init has a bug:
it should say what line number in one's .emacs file it is at.)

Apparently I need to initialize standard-display-table first, perhaps
with make-char-table but of course this is all a minefield for me.

P.S., I will make this into (aset standard-display-table 8206 [9829])
as I would like to keep my .emacs file pure ASCII. I am old fashioned.

>>>>> "EZ" == Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
EZ> Why do you care about this character more than you do about any
EZ> others?  What is so special about it that's worth half a day of your
EZ> time, and give birth to such emotions?

Let's just say that here I am at the bakery, and I'm serving pies with
steel bolts and screws that have fallen into the dough that I cannot see
until the customer hits me with a lawsuit for a broken tooth.

And anyways, I want to be aware of every character in my files. No
hidden jazz. Currently I *can* see everything (with
show-trailing-whitespace t). There is not one single character that I am
not aware of. The worst thing currently is maybe there is a z-variant
that looks like a different character. But the rest I can all see.
Therefore it is a big boundary that emacs crosses when it is the first
time I cannot see a character. OK, I don't live in a Right to Left
country, true.

EZ> Anyway, characters such as LRM should be automatically composed with
EZ> the character that follows them, and then they will be invisible.  But
EZ> the necessary infrastructure in Emacs is not yet ready, so for now
EZ> they look like blanks.
They look like zero width nothings.
EZ> This should be solved before Emacs 24 is released.

P.S.,
(info "(emacs) Undisplayable Characters") should mention Unicode, and
perhaps this character.

(info "(emacs) Bidirectional Editing")
Says "the LRM and RLM characters display as blanks."
Zero width as of emacs-version "24.0.50.1".

(info "(elisp) Key Sequences") could perhaps mention how one can
translate the raw characters, if one wishes to keep ones .emacs file
ASCII. (I spotted the values in the debugger's output.)

OK, thanks. I know you live in .il with the BIDI stuff all day. I'm in
fact doing iconv -f utf8 -t big5 --> plucker-build to put on an old Palm
with only big5 charset. Anyway, I am aghast at the idea of "wetback"
characters hiding in my files.