Re: [libreoffice-users] Feature Request - Categories for special characters

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)



On 11/23/2013 04:48 PM, David Gast wrote:
> 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 &blank; 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  &blank;&blank;100 .
>
> Best regards,
>
> David Gast
> ________________________________________
> From: Kracked_P_P---webmaster [webmaster@krackedpress.com]
> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 15:05
> To: users@global.libreoffice.org
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Feature Request - Categories for special characters
>
> On 11/22/2013 01:20 PM, Mark Bourne wrote:
> > Kracked_P_P---webmaster wrote:
> > > On 11/21/2013 01:59 PM, Mark Bourne 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.
> >
> > > 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 - ¡ ¤ © ® ¶ ¿
> 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.
>
>
>
>
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