is a global configuration, and I don''t believe I can say for a given font, "these glyphs are intentionally blank", which leaves me with these two questions: 1. Is my understanding correct, that I can''t override <blank> per font? 2. The fonts.conf page says that ''fonts often include "broken" glyphs which appear in the encoding but are drawn as blanks on the screen.'' A trawl of the mailing list suggests that this configuration option is ancient -- at least I can''t find any discussion of its introduction -- so is this form of breakage common in fonts we use today? I am aware that I''m attempting to do something rather odd here, so I think I''ll have to do my own substituting with spaces when producing "screen shots" of these old terminal displays, but I wanted to check my understanding of fontconfig''s blank mechanism.