Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis

"Richard" == Richard Wordingham <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> Bad design. Font and characters are 2 separate things. A
>> text-editor should only be concerned with text characters, not
>> fonts. Mixing the element of "font" into a text-search is
>> absurd.

Richard> You misunderstand me. The issue is how the editor is to
Richard> display the text one is editing. The obvious technique
Richard> is to take the characters from a font, perhaps with a set
Richard> of customisation options. The problem arises when the
Richard> characters being used are not covered by a single font.

Usually, it is hard to find a single font that covers the whole
Unicode character set. So, software developers have come up with the
"font set" abstraction: a collection of fonts. The fonts in a font
set may cover overlapping subsets of the Unicode character set. But
if you have enough fonts to cover the whole set, or the subset of
Unicode that you're using, things will display well.

If your editor cannot do that, then, that's not a good one.



Richard> The solution with a simple user interface (i.e. no user
Richard> control) is for the editor (or one of its agents) to
Richard> search the installed fonts when the selected font does
Richard> not handle the specific character. Of course, this can
Richard> work badly when diacritics and base characters do not
Richard> come from the same font. (It seems that Emacs provides
Richard> user control over font mixing.)

Emacs has been supporting fontsets for a decade.


Richard> How does Emacs help with my telling where ZWJ and ZWNJ
Richard> have been placed? I did an experiment with 'Ca‍esar'
Richard> (with ZWJ between 'a' and 'e') and found 'a ZWNJ e'
Richard> displayed as 'a e'.

What are ZWJ and ZWNJ?


Richard> In Code2000 it displays the same as 'æ'. I see I've
Richard> still got some work to do to get Emacs to use the
Richard> Code2000 font, assuming that it's possible.

What's Code2000?



Richard> I have, very occasionally, resorted to fixing Word files
Richard> by editing the RTF files as plain text.

>> Why do you need to do that? Because Word sucks?

Richard> I've had difficulties lining up cells in tables and with
Richard> controlling the incorporation of pictures.

So, use a more decent tool instead of Word.



Richard> This had nothing to do with Word. There was a bug in
Richard> VAX/VMS Run-Time Library and we couldn't move up to the
Richard> next version of the operating system because we were
Richard> dependent on a cheap bolt-on that didn't work on the next
Richard> version of the operating system.

Sigh... legacy systems. They're like plague. The sooner you get rid
of them, the better. Legacy systems only drags progress.



>> Would you choose to buy a badly designed car and then be
>> obliged to fix a few screws everyday, or buy a decent car that
>> have all the screws working well out of the factory?

Richard> Quite a few people choose to run old bangers, some even
Richard> resorting to specially tuning the engines themselves to
Richard> get them through emission tests and then retuning them to
Richard> get adequate power. They reckon they are saving money.

If they know what they're doing and they possess the necessary skills,
then that's fine.

But in your case, do you have such skills? Do you have the skills to
modify or fix your broken tools to do a better job?



Richard> So if I am to use Emacs, am I to create an appropriate
Richard> encoding?

You can. You can even automate many things by written some E-Lisp
code. It's a Turing-complete language. So, what cannot be done?


Richard> Using a legacy encoding for compacting will also result
Richard> in one's having a pair of source and derived files, and
Richard> possible problems if the editor is not clever enough to
Richard> convert the character encoding declaration.

It's a file or worflow management issue. We always of lots of files
and copies (real ones or virtual) around. Having them isn't a
problem. Not managing them properly is.

Nobody has ever complained that after writing a C program, one has to
compile it and that generates a second file---the executable.
(Intermediate-level programs may need to use a third, intermediate
file---object code, too.) Why?



Richard> 5. It's a lot quicker to type '&#331;' for eng than to
Richard> fiddle about with keyboard selections.

>> You mean different Input Methods?

Richard> Strictly yes, but to me 'input method' suggests something
Richard> more elaborate that a software layout.

Yes. "software keyboard layout" is just a very simple special case of
input methods. :)


Richard> Incidentally, I've been trying out Emacs 22.1.1 (build
Richard> environment i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) on Windows XP. I'm
Richard> having severe problems with Lao and Khmer. If I type Lao
Richard> or Khmer in, it seems as though the input is not
Richard> understood. If I paste them in, I still can't yet get
Richard> them to display - I hope simply because, not really
Richard> grokking Unix font specifications, I haven't worked out
Richard> how to specify an appropriate font

If you're using the native Win32 port of Emacs, then Unix font specs.
are irrelevant. The Win32 port should be using native Windows fonts.
You may need to consult the manual, though, to find out the details.



Richard> - but they do get saved when I save the file in UTF-8 or
Richard> UTF-16. It looks as though there is more work to do on
Richard> Emacs for Unicode support.

Yes. Unicode is not native for Emacs. But given that many people use
Emacs to edit UTF-8 and UTF-16 files, and they have been doing that
for years, I don't think there would be a very big problem. You may
want to search the web for some additional Emacs packages that can
facilitate your work.



Richard> I've a lot of study to do in setting up Emacs 22.1.1.
Richard> I've yet to work out why my customisation script for
Richard> MS-DOS Emacs 20.5 made Emacs 22.1.1 sick.

I can't help you here. I've given up Windows/DOS for over a decade.
One thing is sure: Emacs 22 and Emacs 20 are 2 major revisions apart.
There are many differences.


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis
    ... Chinese characters, you should be using one that does it ... Richard> in the font you are using, ... How does Emacs help with my telling where ZWJ and ZWNJ have been placed? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis
    ... It now searches one's fonts for characters not in the font you are using, so that problem has *now* largely gone away. ... It wasn't a problem with Chinese characters, though Windows Vista apparently includes some horrible bodges to get round the TrueType limit of 64K glyphs per font. ... Richard> entities) to check the interpretation of control-like ... This, if I want to mix Thai, Lao, Khmer and Latin-1, I would normally switch between four different keyboard layouts. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis
    ... Richard> displayed as 'a e'. ... I understand they'd be rather important for a proper fraktur font. ... On the other hand, when one uses automatic code generators, there is a severe risk of maintenance being done on the derived files rather than, in these cases, the 'pictorial' sources. ... Richard> Emacs for Unicode support. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Characters displayed small
    ... characters between different sets. ... functions that make emacs consider equally the characters from latin-1 ... set using a different font as told by the fontset. ... emacs-snapshot debian package. ...
    (comp.emacs)
  • Re: Multiple coding systems, and filesystems
    ... The page has a style sheet that makes special suggestions on the font of such words, in a most confusing and tricky way. ... If there were just a few "special" characters, you could present them using entity references like ö or character references like ą, but this gets clumsy if you have full sentences that consist of "special" characters. ... It's not possible to switch the character encoding in the middle of an HTML document. ... Sometimes Emacs asked me for what coding ...
    (comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html)