Re: face for non-ASCII characters

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

2011/4/16 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>:
> On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:18:05 -0500 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote:
>
> TZ> On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:28:01 +0100 Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
> LB> Ok, since you found it useful I tried to finish it. See the attachment.
>
> TZ> Stefan, Yidong, what do you think about something like markchars.el
> TZ> becoming part of Emacs, so users can turn it on with a global
> TZ> customization?  I don't think it has to be a minor mode necessarily but
> TZ> I'm no expert in that area.
>
> TZ> If it goes in there are several tasks: picking a variable name, picking
> TZ> suitable default faces, (maybe) adding a menu item, and documenting the
> TZ> new behavior.  I would really like to make it easily available to Emacs
> TZ> users and will help with these tasks.
>
> I worked on markchars.el some more (over 1 year later, heh).  The result
> is attached; the commentary explains what it will do:
>
> ;;; Commentary:
> ;;
> ;; Mark special chars, by default nonascii chars, in modes where they
> ;; may be confused with regular chars. See `markchars-mode' and
> ;; `markchars-what'.  There are two modes: confusable detection (where
> ;; we look for mixed scripts within a word, without using the
> ;; http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ confusable tables) and pattern
> ;; detection (where any regular expressions can be matched).
> ;;
> ;; The marked text will have the 'markchars property set to either
> ;; 'confusable or 'pattern and the face set to either
> ;; `markchars-face-confusable' or `markchars-face-pattern'
> ;; respectively.
>
> So basically you can choose what to highlight; if you choose to
> highlight confusable characters, any strings whose characters have mixed
> scripts according to `char-script-table' will be highlighted.  I didn't
> use the actual confusables.txt table from
> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ because it's huge and probably not
> very useful; the goal is to show suspicious characters and within
> individual scripts it's rare to find confusable characters.
>
> It's pretty easy to add more markchar properties and to make the
> confusable detection smarter.  Let me know if you find this useful; I
> will propose it for the GNU ELPA if so.
>
> Thanks
> Ted


Nice to see you are enhancing it, Ted. However I wonder if you are
working on an older copy of it since it does not use idn.el. Could you
please take a look at the latest version and see how
idn-is-recommended compares to what you call confusables?