Decision 0015 - ASCII-only console output¶

Date: 30/01/2026 Status: Accepted

Context¶

Fontshow emits human-readable messages and diagnostic payloads to the console. Some environments, log collectors, terminals, or CI pipelines do not reliably handle non-ASCII characters, leading to:

garbled output
broken log parsing
inconsistent snapshots across platforms

Decision¶

Fontshow console output MUST be ASCII-only.

This applies to:

CLI user-facing messages
semantic warnings emitted by the pipeline
normalization diagnostics

Consequences¶

Use -> instead of Unicode arrows like →.
Avoid non-ASCII symbols (e.g. ℹ, ⚠) in emitted text.
Structured fields remain unchanged.
Any future additions to console output must respect this constraint.

Scope¶

This decision governs console output only. It does not constrain internal data structures or JSON payloads.