1

The unicode character BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK (0x2800) is not displaying as a blank character in emacs (version 26.1 on macOS Mojave 10.14). In this image you can see how it displays in Terminal and other Mac applications such as Notes and Evernote...

Viewed in Terminal

When I view in Emacs using the Menlo font (and any other font it looks the same) the blank character is not blank...

Viewed in an emacs buffer

Why is this so?

justinhj
  • 11,147
  • 11
  • 58
  • 104

1 Answers1

1

It turns out this is not an emacs issue but related to fonts. Most Mac fonts don't correctly display BRAILLE unicode characters. You can find a list of fonts that do, as well as showing emoji characters correctly here

enter image description here

justinhj
  • 11,147
  • 11
  • 58
  • 104
  • 1
    Thanks for this, I have the same problem, in 2023 on macos 12.6 monterey, in certain apps (VS Code and Element, but not Terminal or iTerm). At your link I found only one font that works, and it's not fixed-width. Could you possibly say/link more about this issue, and whether you found a fixed-width font that works ? – Simon Michael Jan 22 '23 at 02:00
  • Answering myself.. despite the name, it seems https://unicode-explorer.com/c/2800 is not the right character to use for showing blanks to sighted people. "The Unicode standard explicitly states that it does not act as a space." It may work sometimes, but it's not reliable across mac apps, eg. – Simon Michael Jan 22 '23 at 02:20
  • @SimonMichael It's been a while since I looked at this issue. I'm afraid I am a bit lost because I have a font in my terminal (Hack Nerd Mono) that shows this character blank but the same character and the same font in Emacs is showing the dots. I'm not sure what the right thing for a font to do is, it seems it is supposed to have dots and not behave as a space from a programmatic point of view. What actually happens seems dependent on other issues. – justinhj Jan 25 '23 at 21:13