NamesList, Code Charts, ISO/IEC 10646

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 04 May 2015 10:22:16 -0700
"Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> On 5/4/2015 9:42 AM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > On Mon, 04 May 2015 08:32:46 -0700
> > "Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> >> Reading this discussion, I sometimes wonder whether people have
> >> ever heard of character properties?

> > I believe most ordinary computer users have not heard of them.  Most
> > people do not knowingly have the UCD to hand, or even
> > UnicodeData.txt.

> But people writing character pickers really should mine these.

I agree.  However, some don't even give the character name, which
lack can be really annoying with some diacritics.  My work around is to
look up the codepoint from UnicodeData.txt.

> > One solution that
> > immediately comes to mind is to display the character in a pick
> > list according to the user's locale. Unfortunately, that will not
> > always work.  In these days of Unicode, locales are primarily
> > useful for determining the user interface.

> I still don't follow. If I edit text, then the mirroring happens in
> real time. If it doesn't come out as expected, I can change character
> (or use markup).

In a perfect world, perhaps 'in real time', but not immediately.
Assuming that paragraph embedding is not set to right-to-left, if I
type <U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A, U+0628 ARABIC LETTER BEH, U+0028
LEFT PARENTHESIS, U+062C ARABIC LETTER JEEM>, on typing jeem the glyph
for U+0028 changes from concave on the right to concave on the left,
and moves from the right to the left of beh.

The idea of displaying the glyphs according to the context of the
insertion point does have much merit, but is not so straightforward if
the character picker is a separate application and so lacks the
information.  Of course, the context is not as simple as left-to-right
v. right-to-left, especially for brackets.

Richard.