[Markus Kuhn cl cam ac uk: A suggestion for gucharmap, KCharMap and umap]

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

Hello,

I agree with Markus that gucharmap should have the unicode
annotation and cross reference information. 

Does anyone have ideas on how to present the information in
a way that is usable and not overwhelming?

Noah


----- Forwarded message from Markus Kuhn <Markus Kuhn cl cam ac uk> -----

To: Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>
cc: ceckak alumni washington edu, pfaedit users sourceforge net
Subject: A suggestion for gucharmap, KCharMap and umap
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 17:17:25 +0000
From: Markus Kuhn <Markus Kuhn cl cam ac uk>

Noah Levitt wrote on 2003-01-15 15:08 UTC: 
> Juliusz said I should drop you a note to tell you that ucm 
> is obsoleted by gucharmap (http://gucharmap.sourceforge.net/).

Thanks! I'll update the FAQ on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

accordingly.

Your Unicode character browsing/selection tool looks indeed very good,
though I had so far just a brief look at the screen shots and haven't
actually installed it yet.

In case you maintain a wish list for your program, here is one that I
think is very important (and should also be worth considering for your
competitors KCharMap and ):

It would be great, if your program would display for each character not
only the Unicode name and block name, but all the annotation and cross
references found in

  http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt
  http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.html

These contain a lot of valueable information, such as

0027	APOSTROPHE
	= APOSTROPHE-QUOTE
	= APL quote
	* neutral (vertical) glyph having mixed usage
	* preferred character for apostrophe is 2019
	* preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are 2018 & 2019
	x (modifier letter prime - 02B9)
	x (modifier letter apostrophe - 02BC)
	x (modifier letter vertical line - 02C8)
	x (combining acute accent - 0301)
	x (prime - 2032)

which -- if displayed by all character selection tools -- would increase
*significantly* the chance of people actually picking the semantically
correct characters, and not just one that happens to look in the
currently selected font like what they had in mind. Some of the Unicode
names are for historic reasons a bit missleading (e.g., APOSTROPHE is
not the character that you should use to represent the apostrophe in
English in Unicode!) and need to be read together with annotations such
as the above to get the full picture. There are lots of pitfalls when
selecting characters without the annotations from NamesList.txt.

Some suggestions for the GUI of the proposed feature: When you format
such annotations in an annotation subwindow, the glyphs of the
alternative characters listed should also be shown next to their hex
code, and clicking on them should move you to that character. (And such
hypertext-like behaviour then of course also calls for backwards and
forwards buttons like in a web browser.)

Would be really neat if you could fit that in somehow!

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__

----- End forwarded message -----