To each his/her taste of course, but IMHO all-ASCII does not always go hand in hand with best legibility. What it does go hand in hand with is best typability on English-language keyboards when no keymap is in use.
My first HTML pages were in French and I took the trouble to replace all French non-ASCII characters by their ASCII entities: à ç é ï œ û etc. etc. etc. For French the result is still (barely) human-readable thanks to the many unaccented Latin letters in the text. My current project is a Russian-French dictionary, and replacing all Cyrillic by numeric entities would have turned it completely into gobbledygook. Here I have chosen in favour of UTF-8 with the help of an owncoded keymap and an "international" Latin-alphabet keyboard (except in rare cases such as written as such in otherwise empty <td> table cells) and this suits me perfectly; even the French text looks more readable to me now that I write it in UTF-8. Best regards, Tony. On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 10:50 PM, Eli the Bearded <[email protected]> wrote: > Barry Gold wrote: >> None of these looks like themselves when I edit the file with vim in a >> cygwin Terminal window. I can search for [^ -~^t] to find the non-ASCII >> characters, then go to the original word document to find out what the >> correct character is. If I had only a few of these, that would be >> enough. But in a longer document, a given non-ASCII can occur hundreds >> of times. So once I've found (e.g.) an emdash, I want to replace _all_ >> occurrences with "—". But I have no way of representing the >> character I want to replace on the command line. > > I have a very similar problem to yours and have evolved some fixes that > I use. You've already gotten some replies, but maybe my methods would > help, too. > > In my case, I paste content from web pages into Usenet posts and want to > have as much US-ASCII as possible for best readibility. To that end I > have a specific vimrc for news that fixes things with map!s. It could > easily be modified to a ':so script' usage, to fix things on command > or a 'autocmd BufRead *.html' script to fix thins on load. > > In my vimrc: > > autocmd BufRead .article.* :so ~eli/.news_vimrc > > And my news_vimrc looks like this: > > :r! cat ~/.news_vimrc | mmencode -q > " smart quotes > map! =E2=80=99 ' > map! =E2=80=98 ' > map! =E2=80=9C " > map! =E2=80=9D " > map! =E2=80=B3 " > " ellipsis > map! =E2=80=A6 ... > " n-dash > map! =E2=80=93 -- > " m-dash > map! =E2=80=94 -- > " U+2212 minus > map! =E2=88=92 - > " U+2010 hyphen > map! =E2=80=90 - > " > " find non-ascii > map <F5> /[^ -~]<cr> > " add mime headers if leaving in non-ascii > map <F6> iContent-Type: text/plain; charset=3D"UTF-8"<cr>MIME-Version: 1.= > 0<cr><esc> > map! <F6> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=3D"UTF-8"<cr>MIME-Version: 1.= > 0<cr> > " general news settings > set ai sw=3D4 tw=3D72 > > Basically, I'm suggesting that you take all the charcters you find and > want to replace, and save the replacements in a script you can run > easily before looking for new characters that you want to fix. > > I use http://qaz.wtf/u/ "Show unicode character" if needed to identify > characters, the plugin might suit you better. > > And I have a long-standing macro: > > " Use * to "run" a line from the edit buffer > " Mnemonic: * is executible in "ls -F" > " Uses register y > :map * "yyy@y > > If I were you, I would make the commands, test them with *, then 'p'ut > them in the fix script. > > That * command is one of three macros I consider essential. The other > two I think are less likely to be universally useful, but anyway: > > " Find previous space and split line on it > " Mnemonic: 'S'pace > :map S F r<CR> > " > " Double the character under the cursor > " Mnemonic: fix C code like "if (0 = i) ..." > :map = y p > > Elijah > ------ > can type his entire vimrc from memory, and often does > > -- > -- > You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. > Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. > For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "vim_use" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
