@mkupper said in Why do some characters display as a block unless special characters are anywhere on the same line?:
One comment is that in the thread you reference there is “… are properly displayed ONLY IF the current line contains a character with codepoint over the BMP …”
The examples I provided were all with BMP characters. You don’t need to use a character that’s beyond the BMP.
You rather misunderstood Guy’s statement,
if the DirectWrite option is not checked, the four Unicode characters … are properly displayed ONLY IF the current line contains a character with codepoint over the BMP
The “four Unicode characters” in question were 25F4, 25F5, 25F6, and 25F7, none of which are themselves above the BMP. What Guy’s experiments showed was that, if DirectWrite was not checkmarked, then those four characters would not be shown correctly unless they were preceded by a character above the BMP. So it was having a character above the BMP that made those four in-the-BMP characters display properly.
And, as Alan said, that discussion was about those four clock characters specifically, not about every possible problem that is solved by DirectWrite being enabled.