views:

12

answers:

2

Hi! Quick text-processing question. It's not necessarily related to programming, but this is the best place I figured I should go.

Rate down to tell me this kind of question is not welcome here. (Though, I really like my one little reputation point.)

Anyways, how can I encode text so that two characters get rendered in the same charspace?

NOTE: this is for plain-text -- nothing particularly complex.

A: 

The best you can do is put a backspace character between the two. However the outcome isn't likely to be useful to you, it will depend on what software is being used to display the text. The most likely is that the backspace will be ignored or shown as some generic "unavailable" glyph. The second most likely is that the second character will completely erase the first. You'd have to be very lucky for the two characters to be displayed one over the other in the same space.

Mark Ransom
Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. I tried using a backspace, but he software I was using DIDN'T support them -- Though, I have a few ideas on what WILL.
Georges Oates Larsen
A: 

If it's plain text to be processed by any editor, as far as I know you can't. Even if your text is encoded in Unicode, I don't think it provides combining characters for normal letters, but just for accents and similar symbols which are intended to be combined with other glyphs.

BTW, I'm not sure that stackoverflow is the right place for this kind of stuff, I'd see it better in superuser.com.

Matteo Italia
Thanks for the link. :) Next time I have a question like that, i'll go there.
Georges Oates Larsen