Re: Entering Unicode characters

[Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Feb 06 2016, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> One aspect where some improvement is probably needed is when
> displaying large ranges of characters.  For example, select
> "Scripts->symbol" from the "Character-Browser" menu -- this displays
> all the punctuation characters defined by Unicode.  You get 160 lines
> that display something like 4K characters, which takes a long time to
> display (because Emacs looks for a suitable font), and somewhat hard
> to view.  Maybe we should display with those +/- widgets that allow
> showing and hiding portions of the characters, so that each 256
> characters could be shown or hidden separately?

Maybe. That's definitely more difficult to implement.  In general, there
is no way around that some sets are just big and that some people will
want see all characters.

Maybe some work could be done with "background" timers, e.g. insert 20
lines then wait a bit before starting the next timer and so on.

> Also, I think unassigned codepoints should not be shown, and the same
> for Surrogates and Private-Area codepoints.  They will never yield
> anything but those rectangles with a codepoint in hex inside them.

Not sure about this.  E.g. if somebody want to see an Unicode block he
may well want to see the range defined by the standard.  I also think
that some fonts do assign glyphs in private-use areas.  A part of the
high surrogates seems to be available for private-use as well.

However, using the same glyph for all unassigned codepoints might speed
up things a bit.

> Finally, I think a command to insert the character at point into
> another buffer would be a good addition.

It's not so easy to know where the charactor should be inserted.  Maybe
a marker could be used, but I suspect that that would be confusing.

I had implement a insert-char command that called the browser in a
recursive edit.  It worked but it definitely was confusing.

So my thinking is that the usual commands for copying a character to the
kill ring or copy&pasting it with the mouse is sufficient.

Helmut