I, for one, am totally opposed to any perpetuation of this absurd distinction between "typing" and "unicode" as it only perpetuates the silly idea that somehow western character sets are "normal" and other scripts are "complex text". Are Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Laotian and Thai-speaking users not "typing" simply because they use a different alphabet?
It is, of course, necessary that any/all computing devices support the lower "ASCII" characters, since this is what operating systems, programming languages, compilers, et al. understand. That, in itself, is an artifact of history and not likely to change an any of our lifetimes. But, there is no reason whatsoever that a modern computer should not be able to easily handle ANY character one wishes to type - acknowledging of course that the desired characters must be available in whatever font is desired. As for "universal" Unicode fonts, that is highly impractical for both size (such a font would be HUGE) and aesthetic reasons (what the heck does sans-serif mean in Hangkul script anyway? and how does one match a Thai style to an Arabic one?), but if a user (like me for instance) who occasionally types using three distinct scripts (not including musical symbols, which I also use) on a regular basis, there are many completely free fonts available that cover most arbitrary sets of unicode planes desired. Unfortunately, the major suppliers of such fonts are quite lax in providing information on which scripts are included in any given font they offer. But it isn't all that difficult to locate a variety. There is little support for entering non-Latin scripts in many applications (including MS-Word and LibreOffice Writer - and I say this in spite of all the "Complex Text Layout" obfuscation in the menus of these and other examples - but - using an appropriate "Input Method" (I use iBus for instance) one can easily switch scripts (language support is an entirely different matter). To make matters worse, Writer, as those who regularly use it for multi-lingual writing know, often substitutes fonts that don't require substitution (at least on Linux - I left the Windows world some years back), limits the user to ONE additional "complex text language" and so forth - certainly a legacy of its Star days in spite of the addition of CTL. There are multi-lingual examples that I can type all on one line in a terminal or text editor on my machine that Writer chokes on - even when its CTL is set up. (As a note: for those who use more than one script in a single document, the CTL facility is best avoided: certain passages that Writer butchers can be entered in a text editor and pasted (paste special if regular past doesn't work) into the document if necessary). Having said all that, Writer certainly could use some UI elements that could help: an indication as to what font is actually being used at any given time (and no: the displayed font is NOT always the one in use even when single non-Latin glyphs are used); an indication as to what Unicode plane a character is in, and so forth. Some of the poster's suggestions would certainly be welcome. The ability to pick a font based on the unicode ranges desired would be wonderful - but it strikes me that this really isn't the responsibility of an application ... Being able to select a font and be able to determine which planes are implemented might be more practical, although there are many fonts which "support" a given plane without including all of its defined glyphs. It's a tough call by any measure. Sorry for the rant - but Latin characters written left-to-right are not NORMAL to a large majority of the world; at some point, some bright developer will generalize this much better than is currently done. Right now, the operating systems are ahead of the applications as far as I can see. -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/A-toolbar-option-that-makes-it-easier-to-type-using-unicode-tp4187537p4187893.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
