T minus 8 days to ATypI Brighton 2007: Captioning
The Line 21 captioning system we use over here was designed by unilingual American engineers. The same group was responsible for its two upgrades. These are not the people you want in charge of your character sets and typography.
Prime victim? ¡, the inverted exclamation point. ¿ has always existed in the character set, but ¡ exists only in an extended range, incompatible with Unicode and many old decoders. For years, people faked ¡ by just using a small i, which also isn’t sustainable.
And if you have a shitty HDTV font, as most are, well, maybe the punctuation and accented characters will be in roman even if the rest of the caption is in italic.
Gotta keep them Mexicans in their place. That shit is foreign.