[texhax] Unicode Replacement Character in Standard TeX

[Justin Bailey]

Doug,

I took the liberty of posting your question to the StackExchange's TeX instance:

  http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/223194/unicode-replacement-character-in-standard-tex

Hopefully someone there will be able to answer. Keep an eye out as
people might ask for clarifications.

Hope you don't mind!

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 6:03 PM, Douglas McKenna
<doug at mathemaesthetics.com> wrote:
> Is there a font, available to -all- TeX users, that includes a glyph that can be recognized as the Unicode Replacement Character?  I realize I can use XeTeX with a U+FFFD (or maybe any character not in the font), but I'm interested in using standard pdfTeX with standard LaTeX 2e and a pure ASCII input file.
>
> The glyph typically looks like a filled black diamond with a white question mark inside it.
>
> If no such font is available, what's the best robust strategy for getting such a glyph into a standard pdfTeX document (one whose input file has no Unicode or non-ASCII UTF-8 byte sequences in it) without using XeTeX or similar?  Inserting TikZ commands?  Raw PostScript?
>
> Right now, for lack of a better solution, I'm using a \textbullet, simply because it's the boldest/blackest glyph I can think of, and it's available in most standard fonts.
>
> Creating a custom font with one glyph in it is not really viable, or if it is it's a strategy of last resort, unless (perhaps) it can be done automatically and on the fly when processing the document each time.
>
>
> TIA,
>
> Doug McKenna
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
> Mailing list archives: http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/
> More links: http://tug.org/begin.html
>
> Automated subscription management: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax
> Human mailing list managers: postmaster at tug.org