Is there a character (or a sequence of such) which will be really rendered as if it wasn't there by mIRC?

I'm maintaining a bot which is announcing GitHub / Bugzilla / etc. activity, and I'm trying to avoid highlighting people in the channel. (It's annoying to be highlighted every time you file a new bug etc.)

To accomplish this, I've tried inserting a zero-width Unicode character in the middle of each word. I've already tried a few variations of the Unicode zero-width space, as well as some Unicode meta-characters such as the ones which change RTL directions. However, all of these still show up in mIRC as a narrow space, messing with the kerning and making the line look weird.

I've also tried to insert formatting (color/bold/etc.) characters, but these do not break highlighting in mIRC.

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200B/index.htm

Code point 8203, $chr(8203)

I didn't finish reading your post, I see you already tried that, why doesn't that work for you, because it works for me on mIRC 7.36, using the font verdana.

Here's how it looks for me with Verdana 8 (without and with the ZWS):

The difference is subtle, but it's distracting when every word has this small break in the middle.

Other channel members have complained about this as well, so it's not just me...

Oh ok, I get that subtle difference as well.

Would a $chr(9) work for you?

Thanks for your post. The display issue is due to the way mIRC adjusts character widths for kerning. The next version will check for zero width characters and will skip the kerning adjustment which will resolve the display issue you are seeing.

This issue still exists in v7.38. I have observed it while using Fixedsys and Fixedsys Excelsior fonts.

//echo -a $chr(29) $+ abc $+ $chr(3) $+ 4d $+ $chr(3) $+ 12e $+ $chr(3) $+ 7f $+ $chr(3) $+ 13g $+ $chr(3) $+ hij

Outputs:
abc d e f g hij

Confirmed here, using verdana, there is a small gap between the 'f' and the 'g'

Thanks, this is an issue with the way italics support was implemented, it is not related to zero-width characters. The italics issue is on my to-do list.

Are you referring to Racoon's post or to the original issue? I have not been able to reproduce the zero-width character issue as reported in the original bug report.

I am referring to Raccoon's post, he first reported that on IRC and I pointed out this thread, thinking it was related, I thought I would just share it wasn't just fixedsys that was affected, his example using verdana also shows a small gap between 'f' and 'g'