Interesting. I understand. Quite a dilemma, this.
In that case, may I propose a feature for mIRC 6.36 that would empower users to correct for this problem themselves? Rather than simply allowing Font Linking to be turned on and off (as now), perhaps instead offer three choices: off, automatic (the equivalent of "on" in 6.35), and manual. "Manual" being where the user gets to enumerate his own list of fonts that mIRC will search, to the exclusion of all others detectable from the OS. I wouldn't assume this would require serious programming effort; i.e., whatever logic mIRC currently uses in 6.35 for finding "best candidates" while searching through
all fonts could remain intact and even apply when "manual" mode was selected. The only difference would be, "Manual" mode would simply programmatically hide the existance of any other fonts from that logic, code outer-wrapping style.
%output = $fontlink(%input_text,$windows_font_list) as opposed to
%output = $fontlink(input_text,$mirc_local_font_list) in a sense. :-)
Anyway, such a function would make it possible for users experiencing these difficulties to "screen out" fonts which, as you say, misrepresent their capabilities to mIRC, via their own whitelist. Plus, with the present-day availability of fonts like
Arial Unicode MS,
Bitstream Ciberbit,
TITUS Cyberbit Unicode, and
GNU Unifont, etc., there are sufficient "extremely complete"
and unbuggy fonts out there for mIRC users to obtain and add to such a list.
P.S. While I'm misplacing suggestions in your general Help forum ;-), may I make a second one, also related to Unicode? In all the Font dialogues offering "UTF-8: Default|Display|Display and encode" dropdowns, would you consider offering a fourth option, "Don't display"? Currently, it is possible to disable UTF-8 "globally" (ALT-O > IRC -> Messages > UTF-8 display=unchecked) and then specify per-window exceptions (e.g. UTF-8=Display and encode). However there is no way to do the inverse (UTF-8 on globally, UTF off per-window). I discovered this the hard way after writing a script that produces "hex editor" style dumps in custom windows (see below). As you can imagine, this triggers occasional false UTF-8 decoding. (My solution for now, since I wasn't willing to disable UTF-8 globally, was giving the window tabstops spaced every column and then writing content to the window with tabs inserted between each character to foil UTF-8 decoding attempts by mIRC. Works fine, as you can see, except now it's impossible to copy/paste from such windows -- tab characters get copied too.) Anyway, since I'm sure there are others out there besides just myself who would benefit from being able to specify "off" on a per-window basis for UTF-8 decoding, that's my second suggestion. Oh right, along with a way to control per-window UTF-8 settings with /font so it's scriptable. :-)
