On Mon, 17 Mar 2014 18:18:50 -0500 Naena Guru <[email protected]> wrote: (in topic 'Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka')
> Typing is a nightmare. > When you backspace it destroys multiple keystrokes. I suspect this is a widespread and unsolved problem. If one positions the cursor after a character entered by multiple characters in a previous program, there doesn't seem to be a way of undoing the previous typing. A Latin-1 analogy is entering e-acute by typing 'e and then backspacing later. That will usually simply delete the e-acute rather than leaving the dead key apostrophe. In some ways it may be an insoluble problem rather than merely difficult. For example, when using KMFL to type the Tai Tham script, I have two ways of typing the combination <U+1A49 TAI THAM LETTER HIGH HA, U+1A56 TAI THAM CONSONANT SIGN MEDIAL LA> (historically corresponding to the single character U+199C NEW TAI LUE LETTER HIGH LA and sometimes listed as a letter in its own right): 1) !} 2) s!] I use '!' because I can't get altGr to work in KMFL. It works as a dead key. Key sequence (1) views the Tai Tham sequence as a single character: key sequence (2) views it as the sequence of Unicode characters. The key stokes are based on the Thai Kesmanee keyboard. The mnemonic for the sequences with '!' is that the single key stroke ']' results in U+1A43 TAI THAM LETTER LA. The single, shifted key stroke '}' results in a comma, as in the Thai keyboard. If I position the curor after the character sequence, what should I get after typing <backspace> and then the character '}'? Should I get: (a) <U+14A9, U+1A56> (by assuming input sequence 1); (b) <U+14A9, U+14A9, U+1A56> (by assuming input sequence 2); or (c) <U+14A9, U+002C COMMA> (what I actually get)? > Search and > replace is not possible, at least the way do it with English. I suspect the problem you have have is that editing tools expect the user to think of a combination of base character and combining mark as a single character. I don't know how to counter this expectation. For LibreOffice, I do search and replace by choosing the 'regular expression' option, as this does allow the user to work with characters rather than legacy grapheme clusters (UAX #29: Unicode Text Segmentation). Richard. _______________________________________________ Unicode mailing list [email protected] http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
