Remove green checkmark from docs Markdown

[hpretl]

There is a green checkmark in the summary section of the result Markdown. This special characters fails in some environments, and it is not really needed in my view. Please just stick with a "Pass"/"Fail" verdict.

[hpretl]

@mole99 @RTimothyEdwards Please take a look if you agree.

[mole99]

Hi Harald, can you tell me under which environment it fails?

I personally like the green checkmark ✅ and the red cross ❌ to see at a glance if a parameter failed or everything was successful.

OpenLane 2 already makes heavy use of Unicode and ANSI escape codes and any modern terminal emulator should have support for this. (You too now Tim 😉)

[hpretl]

It fails when compiling the md with Quarto/Pandoc into Latex to compile to a PDF :-) Sounds complicated, but I use it to do this: https://iic-jku.github.io/analog-circuit-design/#t-ota-simulation-versus-pvt

[hpretl]

The alternative is that I do post-processing of the Md to remove these characters, as I do currently with the figures paths (need to tweak the paths). Do you have any idea how to do this with a sed?

[mole99]

Wow, I'm impressed! That's a lot of conditions in those plots 🤯

Yes, you can replace it with sed if you specify the hex value. The UTF-8 encoding for ✅ is 0xe29c85, therefore we can do something like:

echo "✅" | sed 's/\xe2\x9c\x85/Pass/g'

But I believe there is a way to handle this correctly in pandoc. You could try changing the pdf-engine or the font to support Unicode characters. (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18178084/pandoc-and-foreign-characters)

PS: Did you mean to close #109? We can try to find a suitable solution if you need one.

[RTimothyEdwards]

@hpretl : I also have difficulties with unicode, but I managed to figure out some workarounds (like using urxvt instead of mrxvt as a terminal application). However, the checkmark and X-mark are not just unicode, they are from the emoji symbol set, and I also am having difficulty with many applications failing to render them correctly. There are a number of traditional unicode font symbols that can be substituted. Maybe an option to not use the emoji characters?

[hpretl]

As said, I am perfectly happy with an ASCII pass and fail :-)

A WA for me is this: iconv -c -f utf-8 -t ascii $FILE.tmp > $FILE (FILE is the Markdown report)

[mole99]

@RTimothyEdwards Yes, we could try to use alternative characters. How about 🮱 or ✓ and 🮽 or ⨯ ?

[hpretl]

Whatever these characters are, they do not even render correctly in my browser :-(

[mole99]

It should look like:

That is really strange, they seem to be basic Unicode symbols. Does your terminal render them correctly?

[hpretl]

I changed the Latex compiler to Xelatex, and now I can render w/o fail, although it still does not show this caracter. I use now a script to remove all unicode characters :-)

[hpretl]

Not sure about terminal, but also my mail program can not render it (all macOS).

[mole99]

Your browser and mail program probably use the same font which does not support these characters. Are you using the default macOS font? If so, then I'm a bit surprised that they're not supported, but ✅ and ❌ both work?

[RTimothyEdwards]

@hpretl : Just be aware that beyond the check-mark and X-mark, unicode symbols are being used for basic engineering text like square root (as in 1/sqrt(Hz)), squared, micro, degree, and a handful of others. Some of those are in the ISO font encoding and some in the standard symbol font, but I don't know how universally they display. But just watch out for the possibility that wiping all unicode out of the output will screw up a lot of units.

[hpretl]

@RTimothyEdwards Good point! Maybe I need to selectively remove Unicode characters then. But so far, I avoid Unicode wherever I can, and use things like uV and rtHz. :-)