Re: [libreoffice-users] Feature Request - Categories for special characters

On 11/15/2013 05:17 PM, Paul wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:34:33 -0500
> Kracked_P_P---webmaster <webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote:
>
> > On 11/15/2013 01:19 PM, Paul wrote:
> > > On Fri, 15 Nov 2013 18:06:05 +0000
> > > jonathon <toki.kantoor@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > > Sounds simple enough (and useful) to me, and I'm not sure I agree
> > > > > with e-letter's objection above,
> > > > Instead of the current theoretical maximum of 2000 page to search
> > > > for a rarely used glyph, whose position is known, you'd have to
> > > > search through 25000 pages for a glyph whose position is both
> > > > unknown, and unknowable to all, except the creator of the font
> > > > palette.
> > > I really have no idea what you are talking about here...
> > > How does 2000 or 25000 come into it at all? We're simply talking
> > > about being able to filter the list by custom selections, be that
> > > their 20-40 most used, "Engineering" symbols, or whatever.
> > They are talking about Unicode fonts.  They could have 2 to 10
> > thousand glyphs, depending on which language glyphs are supported.
> >
> > What you are asking may be in the "basic" special character sets in
> > Basic Latin, Latin-1, Latin Extended A and B, among other glyph sets
> > in a "well rounded" font.  There may be 100 to 500 glyphs in those
> > sets in your "popular" fonts that are used.  The sets do have names
> > that are defined by the "font standards", but I never remember the
> > names or what goes where.
> That still doesn't make any sense. What is this theoretical 2000
> page maximum?
>
> And why would the glyph's position be known? That's assuming you know
> where the glyph is. Most cases you would only know what it looks like,
> but not where it is in the list, hence why you would want some sort of
> filter to make it easier to find.
>
> And why would a filter on the special characters mean that you suddenly
> need to search through 25000 pages? You would need to search through
> *less* characters, not more, because you have filtered the list to only
> show a subset.
>
> As I see it, the major problem with this is that changing the font
> changes the available special characters. So any subset that was
> defined might not have all the characters available for the selected
> font, but surely that could be shown quite simply?
>
> Or would certain fonts have certain special characters at different
> unicode locations, i.e. would different fonts have different symbols
> for the same unicode point (or whatever it is called)?
>
> And where does the current list of subsets come from anyway? Is that
> defined within the font?


Here is a PDF file with two fonts and their named glyph sets shown in
screen clips of the "Insert Special Character" option.

Liberation Serif has 29 named sets within the range of glyph positions. 
The second font is Arial Unicode MS, which has 79 named sets within the
same range [plus on more position]

http://LibreOffice-NA.US/special-characters-1.pdf

All glyphs have positions in the list of glyphs.  The "space" character
is "U+0020", and the "?" is "U+003F". 

Liberation Serif contains various glyphs from "U+0020" to "U+FFFC",
while Arial Unicode MS goes to "U+FFFD".

Arial Unicode MS includes a large collection of glyphs from many
different languages, while Liberation Serif skips most of them.

To be honest, the basic Latin glyphs that use the letters that English,
Spanish, French, etc., use for their languages, reside in just a few
glyph sets.  Most fonts have these sets plus some of the glyphs used in
Mathematics and other specialized usage in those languages, as well as
some others.  For the fonts that have more glyphs than your "standard"
fonts, they could contain glyphs for non-Latin-based languages and other
special glyphs needed by the user.  But then there are those fonts that
do not use the standard of "this glyph goes here" and use there own
specialized glyph sets.  Many Calligraphy fonts have additional fonts
that contain combinations of letters that you might see in the "art" of
hand Calligraphy.  Also there are those special fonts that are in the
"dingbat", "wingbat", "webdings", and other names of fonts that are
composed of special images in each glyph position.  The number 2 could
be an arrow pointing down and slightly to the left, or it could be a
snowflake, or a pumpkin.  These fonts will not adhere to the glyph name
set "standards".

. . . . And you thought fonts were easy to understand . . . .

Fonts are easy to use but the internal information stored within the
fonts, the glyphs, the set information, and a whole bunch more that most
people never will know about unless you use a font creation software. 

The whole point of this posting is that there may be a lot of "things"
that would need to be known and done for a "special character" sorting
or filtering routine that would work for the major percent of the fonts
out there.  Then there are the pesky ones that will make the routine
fail badly.

To be honest, I am not an expert on fonts.  I have a very large
collection of fonts - over 214,000 files in 15.2 GB of drive space
[according to the "properties" info on the folders that contain the font
collections].  I spent years collecting free fonts and looking into
their differences.  Once in a while I even work on sorting some more of
them in the folders that are listed by name [for serif and san serif]
and by font type [calligraphy, dingbats, non-English languages, and many
others]. 

If you want my opinion, as a person who works with a lot of different
fonts and has over 400 fonts installed on his desktop, the Insert
Special Character option is good as it is.  The only thing that might
help a person, who needs to use the "basic sets" of special characters,
would be a printout of the font glyphs.  There are many font viewer
packages that will allow you to do this.  That way, if you want to use a
special letter with a wavy line above it, you will know where to look
for that character in the glyph list for the font.  I do this from time
to time myself.




-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
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