> A related issue solved along was Windows string representation of paths. std::filesystem::path stores its text in wchar_t encoded as UTF-16 (Windows native). But p.string() narrows it down to the active code page, rather than UTF-8 which is what the formatting library expects. The result was a non-ASCII path could get transcoded to gibberish. The C++26 std::formatter<std::filesystem::path> converts Windows native UTC-16 to UTF-8 using Unicode transcoding and avoiding code pages, therefore solving the problem.

...only to then convert it back to UTF-16 for WriteConsoleW(), which std::print() usually calls (unless not running in a console) (https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/488e7953685722d2d6666f...).