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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

For some reason the arrow ▶ is a double-width character on my PC so it breaks.

I'm using Noto Sans Mono as monospace font. Broken with Iosevka as well, works with Dejavu Sans Mono.

That said, it's pretty cool, bookmarked.

EDIT: weird now I'm looking at my comment from an iPhone and the arrow is rendered with the arrow emoji. Have I found an exploit to embed emojis in HN comments?!

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▶ is not a box-drawing character like the rest, so most monospace fonts won’t support it, so it’ll be rendered in a different font with almost certainly different metrics, so in environments that follow text metrics rather than rigidly drawing on a grid, that arrow will ruin everything. The web is one such environment.

Interestingly, my browser's default monospace choice of Courier is only very slightly distorted by the arrowheads. Like at most 2 pixels off when looking at it at whatever size it is on the dot-to-ascii site. Switching to Menlo results in no distortion at all.

There is a "Boxart" button at the bottom of the page to toggle between pure ASCII chars and "extended" ASCII (not sure what is the proper name).

> EDIT: weird now I'm looking at my comment from an iPhone and the arrow is rendered with the arrow emoji. Have I found an exploit to embed emojis in HN comments?!

Apple emoji font, in addition to emojis, also includes other characters like numbers, arrows, and "trademark" (tm), "registered" (r), and "copyright" (c) symbols, so that's why.

You should try fonts that are not proportional.

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