Re: Making a non-ASCII space character visible

[Michael Heerdegen]

Will Parsons <varro@nodomain.invalid> writes:

> I have a desire to use the Unicode character A007 (FIGURE SPACE) in a
> document and to be able to distinguish it visually from a regular ASCII
> space.  This seems to be already done in the case of 00A0 (NO-BREAK
> SPACE) which appears as an underscore with a distinctive face.
>
> It *looks* like I should be able to do this via the customization
> option "Whitespace Display Mappings", but no matter what I do,
> attempting to "Apply" the changes results in an error message, "This
> field should contain a single character".

Seems you tried to insert a printed representation of the character?
AFAIK you must insert the character.  You can achieve this with M-:
(insert ?\x2007) for example.  Yes, that's not so nice.

> Feeling desperate, I copied the existing value of
> whitespace-display-mappings directly into my custom.el file, and
> manually added a new entry for A007 (8199) on the model of the
> existing entry for 00A0 (160), but this seems to have no effect on the
> display.

If you did it right, note that you must re-enable `whitespace-mode' to
give it a chance to update the `buffer-display-table'.  That doesn't
happen automatically.


Michael.