[texhax] Unicode Replacement Character in Standard TeX

[Douglas McKenna]

Justin Bailey responded -

> 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!

Thanks.  For some reason I was having trouble resetting my stackexchange login password, so I gave up.

Anyway, the (current) final response from Steven B. Segletes (the author of the "stackengine" package he relies on) appears to be a good and simple solution, given that there is no custom font in the current distribution that contains a glyph for the Unicode Replacement Character.  I made some minor changes to reduce the size of the "glyph" and its baseline.  And the graphics and xcolor packages turn out to be unnecessary.

All the remaining suggestions rely on extra files to include as graphics, or whatever, which I want to avoid unless the font is part of the TL distribution.

Karl Berry responded -

> Now, if you're willing to load a font that's not built into the formats,
> there are filled black diamonds (e.g., mathabx -- see
> http://ctan.org/pkg/comprehensive
> ), but I don't see U+FFFD itself in
> that doc.

I don't care about U+FFFD per se.  I just care about the glyph (or an on-the-fly simulation of the glyph, as was posted in the stack exchange answer) being available to use in a LaTeX file that I'm automatically creating based on third-part text files as input.

Thanks!

- Doug McKenna