Counting Devanagari Aksharas

Eli Zaretskii via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sat Apr 22 14:22:39 CDT 2017


> Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2017 17:13:36 +0100
> From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> 
> > Movement by grapheme
> > cluster is AFAIK the most natural way of moving in complex scripts.
> 
> Evidence?

Personal experience?

> It's easiest for displaying the cursor.

It's the _only_ way of displaying the cursor.  You cannot even
meaningfully move by single characters in most clusters, because
composing characters generally completely changes how the original
characters looked, so there's nowhere you can display the cursor.  And
without being able to position the cursor, a visual feedback to the
user becomes troublesome at best.

> I've encountered the problem that, while at least I can search for
> text smaller than a cluster, there's no indication in the window of
> where in the window the text is.

I could imagine Emacs decomposing characters temporarily when only
part of a cluster matches the search string.  Assuming this would make
sense to users of some complex scripts, that is.  You are welcome to
suggest such a feature by using report-emacs-bug.

> SIL's Graphite supports the idea of a split cursor, which
> shows the glyphs corresponding to the characters before and after the
> cursor position.

I find split-cursor to be a nuisance, FWIW.  IME, it confuses the
users without making anything much clearer.


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