https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156507
--- Comment #13 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalr...@gmx.com> --- (In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #12) > With <Ctl>+F10 exposing NPC, an <Alt>+X toggle will show Unicode for the > specific NPC at the text cursor--and then toggle it back. Then knowing the > Unicode, it is trivial to find/delete (or edit) via Find-Replace dialog. It > is not dynamic (requiring linear progression of codepoints being removed > from the text) but it is already functional. Well, Ctrl+F10 doesn't actually expose all non-printing characters, but if it did, and given Alt+X, and given that the user knows about both of them, and if we assume there is no need for applying contextual removal logic (which perhaps we should since not assuming that makes my ask more difficult too), then yes, this could be done by figuring out all relevant codepoints. Ok, conceded, but those are quite a few IF's. And within the set of users who work with text from sources "sullied" with undesirable NPCs - the fraction who both know about Ctrl+F10 and Alt+X and would conceive of this removal process is low. I, for one, didn't even know Alt+X existed... is that on the menus anywhere? And then there's forcing every user to figure this out and go through a rather complex procedure. It's a bit like removing the "distribute width evenly among columns" because it can be done manually with care... But I will also concede that there is a legitimate doubt regarding the extent of potential use. My motivating use case is text coming from PDFs - which I claim is a significant case in terms of number of affected users. There may be other use cases, but that's already speculation. This would not be solved, however, by PDF parsing - since even though the text may originally have come from a PDF - it does not necessarily come from there directly. I would hope to see something like this as an option during the pasting of text, and when opening a PDF. Thanks for the link to the bug regarding ActualText. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.
