On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 12:26:12PM +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
There are several UTF-8 characters at the Kernel's documentation.
[...]
Other UTF-8 characters were added along the time, but they're easily replaceable by ASCII chars.
As Linux developers are all around the globe, and not everybody has UTF-8 as their default charset
I'm not aware of a distribution that still allows selecting a non-UTF-8 charset in a normal flow in their installer. And if they haven't purged support for ancient encodings, that support is thoroughly bitrotten. Thus, I disagree that this is a legitimate concern.
What _could_ be a legitimate reason is that someone is on a _terminal_ that can't display a wide enough set of glyphs. Such terminals are: • Linux console (because of vgacon limitations; patchsets to improve other cons haven't been mainlined) • some Windows terminals (putty, old Windows console) that can't borrow glyphs from other fonts like fontconfig can
For the former, it's whatever your distribution ships in /usr/share/consolefonts/ or an equivalent, which is based on historic ISO-8859 and VT100 traditions.
For the latter, the near-guaranteed character set is WGL4.
Thus, at least two of your choices seem to disagree with the above: [dropped]
0xd7 => 'x', # MULTIPLICATION SIGN
[retained]
- U+2b0d ('⬍'): UP DOWN BLACK ARROW
× is present in ISO-8859, V100, WGL4; I've found no font in /usr/share/consolefonts/ on my Debian unstable box that lacks this character.
⬍ is not found in any of the above. You might want to at least convert it to ↕ which is at least present in WGL4, and thus likely to be supported in fonts heeding Windows/Mac/OpenType recommendations. That still won't make it work on VT.
Meow!