Re: Word Processors

On Sat, 06 May 2006 21:05:31 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> Paul Bennett wrote:
>> I'm looking for a Word Processor for Windows that supports Unicode
>> planes
>> other than the BMP.
>>
>> The copy of MS Word that I have (with Office XP Pro) refuses to even let
>> me select a Plane 1 font (Code 2001), and pastes Plane 1 characters in
>> as
>> the "No such character" rectangle regardless of the fonts in the source
>> app or in itself.
>
> Not sure I understand what your problem is (what is a Plane 1 font?) but
> my
> version of MS Word (2000 I think) has no problems AFAICT. I've even
> created
> my own shortcuts, e.g. Left-Alt+? makes glottal stop.
Unicode basically consists of four sets of 65536 characters, sets 0, 1, 2,
14, 15 and 16 (why 14, 15 and 16 and not 3, 4, and 5 is a matter best
reserved for the incurably curious). Each set is called a "Plane".

Plane 0: Base Multilingual Plane - Scripts in common and modern use
Plane 1: Supplementary Multilingual Plane - Rare or ancient scripts
Plane 2: Supplementary Ideographic Plane - About 40,000 rare Chinese
characters
Plane 14: Supplementary Special Purpose Plane - Technical mumbo-jumbo,
which no sane person needs to understand
Planes 15 & 16: Officially designated as "No official designation". Free
for Con-scripts or whatever else on a font by font basis. No interfont
consistency of character number to graphical symbol mapping is guaranteed
or even hinted at.

Technically, Unicode is a set of 4,294,967,296 characters, but only the
subsets above are currently defined (or will be in the next version).

Most software only supports Plane 0, since it was originally the only
Plane, and support for the others requires going from 2 bytes per
character to 3. Anyone designing modern software that uses less than 4
bytes per character is asking for significant trouble later on down the
line.

> A previous version of Word (and one of Ooo.1) for a while allowed me to
> type
> in the Unicode no., then hit IIRC Control-x, and the char. would
> magically
> appear. That function stopped working for unknown reasons. My present
> versions don't seem to have it.
I think the modern form is Alt+NumPad, Ctrl-X, but that only seems to work
in Office XP for Plane 0 / BMP characters.

>> I'm downloading Ooo 2.0.2 right now, but if that doesn't cope well, I'd
>> love to get recommendations from the list.
>
> I'm not wild about Ooo,
Neither am I, having tried it, but it at least allows me to paste Old
Persian, even if I can't directly enter it via the "Insert Symbol" dialog.
I may yet try to make a keyboard layout that would allow me to type
directly...

> I do recall that Word Perfect stuff
> was unreadable by many.  WP is more cumbersome than either Word or Ooo
> w.r.t. special chars, but does have one wonderful feature called "reveal
> codes".
They still have that in modern Word Perfect??? I may just have to revisit
the ol' girl just for that handy feature. Corel now own WP, and they're
fairly sane about Unicode, but I haven't yet tried anything REALLY clever
in Corel Draw...




Paul