Allegedly, on or about 29 November 2013, Ed Greshko sent:
One interesting thing I discovered, at least on my F19 system, is if
I
highlight (copy) the Phi and then paste it into a terminal the
resulting character is a delta.
That seriously points to it being a broken font, then.
What's on the page is an instruction to print character number whatever.
Depending on what's in the font, will be what you see.
If you copy and paste the text, you're copying the data about which
(numbered) characters are there. It'd take something that copies the
data, plus the formatting, and re-applies the same formatting (and
therefor same font), for an error to be repeated.
The original poster could test that out in any editor that lets them
change fonts. Type the character out several times, and change the font
for each of them, separately. When you pick a broken font, it'll change
what it looks like.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.8.13-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon May 13 13:36:17 UTC 2013 x86_64
All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.
George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.