Feature Request - Categories for special characters

users
#21

I think you are asking for something like Thunderbird's Insert Special Character option. That option might be used as a different Special Character option. I really do not think that it would work on the non-Latin fonts or give you all of the glyphs/characters, especially the Unicode font's glyphs/characters, that the font has to offer or needed.

So I really think we need to keep the existing Special Character option, but could add on the "alternative" and limited one that Thunderbird has to LO. Since Thunderbird is also Open Source [so I have been told] you should be able to find the coding for this option if you look for it. [maybe even ask their developers for it]

I am using it now so I can give you examples.

You select all of the "a" characters, and then go down the scrolled list for the "a" character you wish to add.
      à á â ã ä å a; a*' a* a^'
There are 30 in the lowercase "a" list.

The Categories are - and some samples from Times [if they go through correctly]

Accent Uppercase - È È E`` O;- O^' ? T^

Accent Lowercase - t" ? ë e^ e~

Other Uppercase - Æ Ø DZ( Œ

Other Lowercase - æ ß ø œ

Common Symbols - ¡ ¤ © ® ¶ ¿

#22

Kracked_P_P---webmaster wrote:

David Gast wrote:

I have two ideas.

Interestingly, Windows Vista's "Character Map" utility (and probably
also Windows 7's?) has similar ideas...

1. Highlight the categories, so it is easy to tell where the category
starts and ends.

Vista's character map has an option to group by Unicode subrange,
where only the characters from the selected subrange are shown - as
opposed to LibreOffice's current behaviour of jumping to the first
character in the range, but giving no easy indication where the range
ends. As you suggest, highlighting the range would be similarly helpful.

2. Allow some input box so you could type some substring of the
characters' names and get
     all matching characters. For example, if you typed equal, all
characters with equal
     in the name would be listed. (I do not know if the names are
i*18n or not.).

Vista's character map does pretty much exactly this. I think the
character names are defined in the Unicode standard. Not sure if
they're internationalised though. The thing that keeps catching me out
with Vista is that after searching, the "Search" button changes to
"Reset" - so to do a new search you have to first reset, then type the
query string, then search; you can't just type a new query and search
for it.

Mark.

I think you are asking for something like Thunderbird's Insert Special
Character option. That option might be used as a different Special
Character option. I really do not think that it would work on the
non-Latin fonts or give you all of the glyphs/characters, especially the
Unicode font's glyphs/characters, that the font has to offer or needed.

I don't know about Thunderbird, but Windows Vista's character map (which I was describing) does work for all Unicode characters in the selected font. I'd expect Window 7's character map to also work similarly. For example, search for "sharp" and it returns:
   ß (U+00DF: Latin Small Letter Sharp S)
and
   ♯ (U+266F: Music Sharp Sign)

Want a division sign? My initial attempt searching for "divide" didn't get it, but trying another term "division" gets:
   ÷ (Division Sign)
   ∕ (Division Slash - not the same as /)
   ⊘ (Circled Division Slash)
   ⋇ (Division Times)

I'm not certain, but think the names for the characters are defined by the Unicode standard.

So I really think we need to keep the existing Special Character option,
but could add on the "alternative" and limited one that Thunderbird has
to LO. Since Thunderbird is also Open Source [so I have been told] you
should be able to find the coding for this option if you look for it.
[maybe even ask their developers for it]

I am using it now so I can give you examples.

You select all of the "a" characters, and then go down the scrolled list
for the "a" character you wish to add.
      à á â ã ä å a; a*' a* a^'
There are 30 in the lowercase "a" list.

It looks like that's just searching for characters which look similar to the one you type? Probably based on some sort of lookup table.

#23

Not all of the symbols/characters/glyphs came out correctly on the list's email.

I do wonder if Thunderbird's limited Special Character option is somewhat like the poster's idea of an option for the special characters. As I stated before, it is limited and I would not want to see the current Special Character option be replaced, but the one that Thunderbird has might be an interesting secondary option.

As for the "division" and "music" glyphs/characters, there is a glyph range in Unicode for music related characters - 1D100 -- 1D1FF. As for the Math symbols, well there are several ranges that are populated with them, for most of these ranges.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

This link has the Unicode names for every symbol that they list. So if you have a musical, mathematic, or any other character/symbol/glyph, you can look through the PDF files for the names of the symbols and see what they look like, or the reverse. There are a lot of symbols for Math that I have not seen in over 20 years and did not remember at all, till I saw their shapes in the lists.

#24

One additional idea. Have some method so that if you type a character, LO can
show you all fonts that have that character. Otherwise it can be difficult to find
a font with that character. Bonus: This method would also let you see what that
character looks like in different fonts. You may not think about checking some font,
but it might have a great looking character (in your opinion) that you need all the time.
For example, when typesetting computer code, I prefer a slash through the zero so it
does not get confused with a capital Oh. (I know some fonts put a dot inside; I prefer
a slash.)

Background: I have a program for creating randomized versions of tests.
The output format is HTML. I Insert -> File into LO so that I can get the
page breaks correct (by adding blank lines) and make a PDF file for printing from a
computer that does not have LO installed. (Firefox and/or our printer s/w breaks
pages differently in Print Preview and when actually printing. Very annoying.)

On a recent test, I noticed that the HTML ␣ entities did not get changed when
inserting, so I had to hunt through different fonts to find that character. That is, the
Writer document showed something like ␣␣100 .

Best regards,

David Gast

#25

You are now talking about a font searcher and manager. That should not be part of a word processor, but a separate package.

First you need to look at the Unicode specs to get the font data on where the "characters" should be. The other way would take a lot of programming to look at the font's internal glyph descriptions and then decide if it has an "A" or "a" in it. That is not as easy as you think. Our brains will do it just fine, but a computer "brain" to do the same is something that many other fields have been trying to create for many years. To have a computer see an image and pick out if it has or does not have an image of a font character/glyph, among all of the various styles that fonts come in, can be very hard to do and could take some real complex code to do it even half of the time.

Searching a font to see if a glyph is defined in the place it should be could be an easy code to make for someone who knows how to write code that reads the internal font glyph specifications. I do not know if the LO developers can do this or do they get their font coding from other sources, or other project coders of open source packages.

As for the "&blank" character, do you know what it the position/placement in the Unicode specifications? That is a start. Actually there is a control character[s] in the ASCII code that do the job. I uses them in programming many times to get to the End-Of-Line [EOL] or go to a new page with Form Feed [FF].

Maybe it is not completely the font's fault, but how Writer and Firefox sees the command of entering a blank line. Does Writer see the "&blank" as text or the control character? Does Firefox? Many time when we use a word processor to create a web page, and not a text editor or web page only WYSIWYG package, the text of "&blank" may be considered to be text and not a command or HTML Tag. "<br>" is to be a end of line and go to the next line. But is it the text of these characters or the HTML Tag that you are using? How does Writer knows and how does Firefox? The lines can blur easy enough.

Here are some ASCII control codes. Writing this, for the Line Feed character I see the HEX number, a glyph image of a filled in half height square, then <control> What you will see after this post goes through the server's filters and possible font changing on the email client's end, well I cannot predict all of the possibilities.

000A  <control>
    = LINE FEED (LF)
    = new line (NL), end of line (EOL)
000B  <control>
    = LINE TABULATION
    = vertical tabulation (VT)
000C  <control>
    = FORM FEED (FF)
000D  <control>
= CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)

#26

On a recent test, I noticed that the HTML &blank; entities did not get changed when inserting, ...

Could that be because &blank; is not an HTML entity?!

That is, the Writer document showed something like &blank;&blank;100 .

An HTML principle is that white space is condensed, so two blanks would appear as one anyway. To avoid this, you need the non-breaking space, &nbsp;.

Brian Barker

#27

"Regina Henschel":

I do not like the idea to remove characters or group them in another
way. The Unicode groups are well defined and easy to handle.

Unicode groups are non-intuitive and mostly disjointed. Characters like arrows are impossible to find there.

#28

Hi Urmas,

Urmas schrieb:

"Regina Henschel":

I do not like the idea to remove characters or group them in another
way. The Unicode groups are well defined and easy to handle.

Unicode groups are non-intuitive and mostly disjointed. Characters like
arrows are impossible to find there.

The group is "Arrows". I see no difficulty to find that group. If you know the group name, you need not to scroll. When the field "subset" has the focus, type A r r and you are there.

I'm sure, you will know the group names of those characters you need, very quickly. For me it is "General punctuation" and "Mathematical Operators". For me the group names describe well, which characters are contained in that group. You only need to know, that the characters which are in ISO-8859-1, are in group "Basic Latin" and "Latin 1". So a few characters, for example ² or ×, are not in the group to which they would belong according their meaning.

If you really need a quick access to a fixed set of special characters, then make your own toolbar or menu. If you need some help, how to do it, I can sent you a template with some French characters in a toolbar, which are inserted using a macro.

Kind regards
Regina

#29

Try the program "babelmap" from www.babelstone.co.uk/software/babelmap.html

With this program you can view all the unicode planes that a font has and can use "virtual fonts" that are a mixture of several fonts.

A companion of this program is BabelPad, which allow you to write in any unicode script.

These are specialized programs freely available.