After an evaluation, GNOME has moved from Bugzilla to GitLab. Learn more about GitLab.
No new issues can be reported in GNOME Bugzilla anymore.
To report an issue in a GNOME project, go to GNOME GitLab.
Do not go to GNOME Gitlab for: Bluefish, Doxygen, GnuCash, GStreamer, java-gnome, LDTP, NetworkManager, Tomboy.
Bug 91496 - Gnome-character-map must be able to select ANY UTF8 symbol, not just Latin.
Gnome-character-map must be able to select ANY UTF8 symbol, not just Latin.
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: gnome-utils
Classification: Deprecated
Component: gcharmap
2.0.x
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: GNOME2.x
Assigned To: gnome-utils Maintainers
gnome-utils Maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2002-08-23 07:17 UTC by sdiconov
Modified: 2004-12-22 21:47 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement


Description sdiconov 2002-08-23 07:17:56 UTC 
Gharmap (Hope I'm not confused by the name) is currently a pretty useless
toy. Most of the symbols it presents now can easily be input from the
keyboard. The user is stuck when there is a need to insert Greek, Phonetic,
Chineese, Serbian... symbols.

The symbol map must span all of UTF-8 to be actually usable in a Unicode
environment.
Comment 1 Glynn Foster 2002-08-23 08:27:48 UTC 
Can you try out gnome-utils HEAD and test this? There is code there to
support full unicode....
Comment 2 John Fleck 2002-11-28 03:49:08 UTC 
No feedback. Closing.
Comment 3 sdiconov 2002-12-04 22:55:24 UTC 
Sorry for the lag... I had no Internet access for some time. I have
gnome-character-map ver 2.1.2 now. It is really able to select
arbitrary Unicode character, but I have two remarks:

1) The navigation abilities are not enough. It is not possible to
remember "page" numbers for all characters. However ISO10646-1 ranges
have descriptive names. It would be cool to add a translatable
drop-down list with these names. A user would be able to tell the app
what sort of a character he/she/it  needs and be immediately presented
the appropriate range/page. 

Select "APL symbols" -> see all APL symbols, select the desired one.
Select "Mathematical symbols", "Misc. Technical", "Tamil alphabet",
"Runes" -> get to it immediately.

Basic keyboard navigation (PageUp|PageDown to move between pages) is
also an idea.



2) There are no free or GPL fonts to show all of the unicode symbol
range. Instead we have a multitude of small fonts covering most of the
ISO10646-1 (including wildly exotic scripts). It means that there is
no way to see all/most of the characters at the same time. 

It is impossible to select a symbol without seeing it however. The
solution to this problem is implemented in the multilingual text
editor yudit (www.yudit.org). Yudit has ability to combine arbitrary
amount of fonts to display a single document. Basically it uses the
specified font until there are glyphs to visualise a character in it. 
If the font has no glyph it searches other fonts available to find a
proper shape. The result is more than acceptable. Why not use ALL
fonts accessible for Gnome to display all possible charcters? Anyway,
European typefaces are not applicable to most scripts which are
generally absent from the standard fonts, so substitution of a
fontface is not a big issue here.
Comment 4 Glynn Foster 2003-05-19 10:22:23 UTC 
Not going to fix - gucharmap is now the replacement for the
gnome-utils one. It should be working nicely there.