On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 12:35:19AM +0100, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Stefan Sperling:
> 
> > > Some source files also have old-style ^L pagination.
> > 
> > ^L seems to show up fine for me. It displays as "^L", i.e. ^ and L.
> 
> It's passed as whitespace and then post-processed to "^L" by whatever
> is doing that, messing up the width again.
> 
> > > I do like ^ notation for control characters.
> > 
> > Does that mean you'd rather just special-case ESC instead of the above patch?
> 
> No, I wonder whether format_line() should do the ^ escaping itself.

You've lost me a bit. Could you write a patch to demonstrate this?

Do you mean format_line() should replace e.g. formfeed with "^L", and
so on for other control characters? Won't that make the string wider
because we're now using two columns instead of one for those bytes?