William Overington <WOverington at ngo dot globalnet dot co dot uk> wrote:
> A particularly interesting new feature is that one may hold down the > Control key and press the Q key and a small dialogue box appears > within which one may enter the hexadecimal code for any Unicode > character. Upon pressing the Enter key, that character is entered > into the document. SC UniPad contains its own font. In a thread two weeks ago about Alt+NumPad sequences, I did mention that SC UniPad 0.99 would include this Ctrl+Q feature. It's a very handy device; my biggest obstacle so far, in fact, is simply *remembering that it's there* and using it, instead of opening Character Map and clicking on the character, which is what I had to do before (and which is still useful if I needed to browse CM to find the character in the first place). > Please note in particular the buttons in a column down the left hand > side of the display. These alter the way in which some code points > are indicated in the display. For example, if one clicks on the > button labelled FMT (which controls Character Rendering: Formatting > Characters)and selects Picture Glyph, then entry of U+200D into the > text document shows a box with the letters ZWJ in it. And best of all, you can set these rendering options independently for space characters, ASCII controls, other formatting characters (a broad category), characters unsupported in the UniPad font (a dying breed; only Plane 2 is not supported), unassigned code points, unpaired surrogates, and private-use characters. Note that unpaired surrogates are supported for testing purposes, but aren't really a good thing to have lying around. Also note that your choices for private-use characters are a generic picture glyph or a rectangle containing the USV in hex -- sorry, you can't install your own PUA font. ALSO, note that the hex-value display option for unassigned code points provides a neat solution to Martin Kochanski's earlier question about .notdef glyphs (and the ensuing discussion where Carl Brown and others suggested 2×2, 2×3, or 3×2 blocks of hex digits). BTW, the View toolbar doesn't have to run down the left side. It's there by default, but you can dock it elsewhere or let it float as a separate window. I have the Convert toolbar on the left side and View on the right because I use Convert more often. > I first learned of the existence of the UniPad program in a response > to a question which I asked in this forum, so I am posting this note > so that any end users of the Unicode system who are at present unaware > of the existence of the UniPad program might know of the opportunity > to have a look at it if they so choose. > > The web site has a facility to request email notification of > developments to SC UniPad. It was by a such requested email > notification that I became aware of the availability of SC UniPad > 0.99. I have asked the main developer of UniPad to post regular update notices on this list, and he says he will do so shortly, when he can put together a more thorough list of the new features in 0.99. Trust me, there are a LOT. ☺ -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
