The character in question is the Braille Pattern Blank: "⠀"
On machines with Windows and even on my phone, this character is rendered as invisible (as seen here). This is helpful because it can be used to center text on sites such as Steam. However on my current machine which runs on Artix Linux, it does get rendered and instead of white-space, I get a series of braille symbols, which results in a mess like this.
Issue does not seem to be application-dependent, as Brave, Firefox and also my terminal Alacritty display the Braille Signs. I also tried using Arial from the as display font which is apparently used on Windows but that did not work either (font was taken from the AUR package ttf-ms-fonts).
Xorg is used for display.
How would I go about getting the character to be invisible again?
21 Answer
This is a font design issue.
The Braille Pattern characters are a 2×4 grid of dots, some of them black, the rest white. In some fonts, the white dots are completely blank, while other fonts use open circles (so that there is no ambiguity over which dots are which, for example when there is just a single black dot). This is an aesthetic decision made by the font designer, and they are equally correct. The designer of your current font has chosen the open-circle style.
Therefore, using U+2800 as a blank space is not reliable. Proper space characters should be used intead.
Using Arial will not help, because it does not contain Braille Pattern characters. Windows uses Segoe UI Symbol as the fallback font for Braille; it is the blank-space style. The vast majority of fonts do not contain Braille.
Three free fonts that have blank-space style Braille are:
- Noto Sans Symbols 2
- Cascadia Code
- Symbola (font is an attachment within the PDF file)
