Re: Input method or help feature needed

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 09:27:05 +0100
> From: tomas@tuxteam.de
> Cc: tomas@tuxteam.de, Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>, rms@gnu.org,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
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> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 05:41:19PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> > tomas@tuxteam.de writes:
> 
> > > As an additional thought: this won't work for non-English speakers,
> > > right?
> > 
> > I'd think of it like a programming language -- it's nominally "English",
> > but of a rather limited and regular sort.
> 
> Kind of. Still, a non-English speaker is less likely to come up with a
> construct like "DOTLESS", to keep to the example.

I don't understand what you have in mind, specifically.  Unicode
character names are defined in English only.  The only official
translation is into French (http://www.unicode.org/fr/), and even
there many links point back to the English site.  So anyone who looks
for a character by its name in practice must know the English name.

> > Can you think of any mechanism that both completely avoids naming and
> > covers the entire unicode space though?
> 
> You are completely right, that's hard (although this thread is producing
> surprising ideas already). My reply wasn't meant as an objection to the
> method proposed. Rather as a reminder: we're not done with that, and we
> might need a whole bunch of interfaces, complementing each other.

At least one interface that is based on character shapes (rather than
on their names) was mentioned in this thread.  So it doesn't sound
like we forgot something.