From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 00:23:41 EDT
--- Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr>
wrote: > On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 04:34, Andrew Dunbar
wrote:
> >
> > Well the Insert Symbol stuff really needs to be
> > redone anyway in a proper Unicode way that really
> does
> > allow us to enter any codepoint on a
> font-independent
> > basis. I think there is a bug or two filed
> regarding
> > this so I wouldn't worry too much. As usual this
> is
> > one of the things I'd like to work on if things
> were
> > more in my favour.
>
> The problem is that we query the glyphs of the
> symbol fonts not by its
> unicode codepoint, but by its index in the font.
> I.e., we do a
> drawChar(..., 30, ...), where 30 is supposed to be a
> UT_UCSChar.
Yes that is usual and that is the problem with the
Symbol font, as well as the dingbats fonts.
Choosing a symbol from the Insert Symbol dialog should
insert just a plain character, not set the font as
well
as inserting a character. I doubt even that these
fonts
support Unicode character names.
If it's really needed to support specific fonts as
well
as non-font-specific symbols, I strongly feel the
Insert Symbol needs two distinct pages. One for
Unicode symbols which will insert only a plain
UCSchar with no font information, and a seperate page
which lets you specify the font and also inserts font
information into the document.
These fonts are evil for many reasons. Searcing for
one. Try cutting a symbol from text using the symbol
font and pasting it in the search dialog. It will
probably be a letter and it will match letters!
Cutting and pasting into plain-text programs suffer in
the same way. We should do all we can to dissuade
users from using Symbol fonts in this way and get them
to use just the Unicode values. At another level we
can always use the Symbol font to display these
characters anyway since they will be absent from
typical fonts, but at least then import, export, cut+
paste, etc will all work.
> Xft remaps the symbol font to show clients a unicode
> mapping for the
> font. Of course, when I try to draw the unicode
> character 30 with a
> symbol font, Xft says that this font don't have the
> character 30 and it
> draws nothing on screen.
That's because 30 is in the ASCII range. It's all
evil I tell you. Special case code to handle symbol
font and friends is wrought with more problems than
even smart quotes IMHO.
From the Unicode FTP site you can download mapping
tables between Symbol Dingbat font indexes and Unicode
indexes.
> I will try to fix all that asap, but I'm only having
> something as 1 hour
> by day, so I'm not doing it fast enough...
As usual I really wish I could help. I'm forwarding
this to the dev-list because I think others may find
it
interesting.
Andrew.
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Joaquín Cuenca Abela
> cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr
>
=====
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