Re: Entering Unicode characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 13:40:11 +0100
> Cc: Tianxiang Xiong <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> > I want a system that lets me choose them by seeing them on the screen.
> > I want to specify a language or script and see all its characters.
> >
> > For instance, if I enter 'turkish' it should show me all the
> > characters used in Turkish.  Then I could pick the dotless i from the
> > buffer.
> >
> > Would someone please implement this?
> 
> I like this idea, though I do not know enough about Unicode etc to
> implement it...

I don't think any deep knowledge about Unicode is needed.  What you
need is:

  . a way to display a range of Unicode characters and let the user
    select the one she wants (this should be able to handle a large
    range without annoying delays, e.g., by breaking such long ranges
    into smaller blocks and providing buttons to unhide and hide them)

  . a database of languages and the corresponding Unicode blocks (we
    already have that for scripts, but languages sometimes select
    narrower ranges, in particular in the Latin and Greek script
    parts)

The somewhat tricky part about the last item is that some languages
use non-contiguous portions of a block that is shared with other
languages.  The Cyrillic block is one good examples.  IWBNI the
feature would either refrain from displaying irrelevant characters, or
maybe display them with pale colors, to indicate that they are not
relevant to the language.

TIA