Antoine, Thanks dankon merci to you and the others who responded to my query about displaying Unicode supplementary char glyphs in (g)vim.
As far as I (a vim beginner) can tell, (g)vim is currently unable to display glyphs for Unicode _supplementary_ chars (they appear as question marks) and at least two of us would like to have this problem fixed. I intend to do a lot of editing with supplementary chars, mostly Deseret Alphabet and Shavian for now, and the current behavior makes vim unusable for me. I can't edit a screen full of question marks. As for digraphs, kindly suggested by LandSurveyor, I find the vim KEYMAP facility to be far more flexible and suited to my task than digraphs. Keymaps let you define mappings involving one (keyboard event) to one (Unicode char) one to many many to one many to many which facilitates defining input methods based on strict transliterations, which is what I prefer to use. And you can define any number of keymaps, activating one at a time as you switch from script to script. It's very easy in vim. I have defined a vim keymap for the Deseret Alphabet (which I'd be glad to forward to anyone who might be interested) based on the SAMPA transliteration, usually used for the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), with mappings like p <Char-0x10439> b <Char-0x1043A> t <Char-0x1043B> d <Char-0x1043C> tS <Char-0x1043D> dZ <Char-0x1043E> i.e. 0x10439 is the lowercase Deseret Alphabet char representing the /p/ phoneme, 0x1043A is the DA lowercase char for representing the /b/ phoneme, ... 0x1043D is the DA lowercase char for representing the phoneme usually written 'ch' in English, as in "church", etc. These are supplementary chars (beyond 0xFFFF). This keymap seems to work perfectly, as far as entering the Deseret Alphabet chars is concerned, and I can write the resulting buffer to file, and the file contains the expected chars. Everything seems perfect, except that all I see are question marks in the vim interface. As a beginner, I don't know if I could be of help in fixing this problem. If anyone has suggestions for fixes, workarounds or how I might help, please pass them along. Gxis revido, Ken On 1/6/07, A.J.Mechelynck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
LandSurveyor wrote: > Your secret to success is 'digraphs'. Vim provides its' own method of displaying many special characters. > While in vim, type ":help digraphs"-and enjoy! > > -----Original Message----- >> From: Kenneth Reid Beesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> Sent: Jan 6, 2007 12:30 AM >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: Vim and Unicode supplementary chars >> >> I've started looking at vim again, and as far as I can see, it >> "handles" Unicode supplementary chars internally, but still >> doesn't render them properly. >> >> E.g. if you enter CTRL-V U00010400 the character is in the >> buffer, and can be written to file, but all you see on the screen >> is a question mark. >> >> Is that still the status? or is there a way to enter supplementary >> chars in vim and see the glyphs? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Ken > > With or without without digraphs, I have never succeeded (yet) to display Unicode codepoints above U+FFFF as anything but a question mark. I think it is a limitation of current versions of (g)vim but I sure would like it to be removed. There are quite a number of Chinese characters in Plane 2 (U+2xxxx) which are displayed correctly by my browser; but they show in gvim as only a wide question mark. Can't find it in the Todo list, but that list is so long, the item could quite well have escaped me. Best regards, Tony.
