[Scilab-users] New constant %chars to get sets of symbols

[Samuel Gougeon]

Dear Scilabers,

The need of easily accessing to some sets of symbols in Scilab -- like 
greek letters, etc -- has been reported for years, for instance in 2011 
as the wish 9221 <http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9221>, or 
more recently as the wish 16505 
<http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16505> (July 2020).

While these reports have still no actual answer, I definitely share this 
opinion. In many usual situations it is possible and preferable to 
directly use and write symbols -- in the documentation, in graphics 
titles, legends or other annotations, etc -- that do not necessarily 
request LaTeX expressions or HTML entities, and that are then directly 
readable in the code.

For more than 3 years now, i have set in my startup file and i use on a 
regular way a constant built as a structure, whose fields are the name 
of some "classes" of characters.
Then, displaying the constant in the console, and copying/pasting 
selected characters from the display is straightforward, and always 
available.
I find it much more handy than if there were somewhere a menu to browse, 
a menu item to select, a popup showing a table of characters to expect, 
added to the selection/copy/pasting of the chosen character.

As well, i must confess that having a ALT+X or any other keys shortcut 
able to convert a series of 2 to 4 input unicodes to the corresponding 
character -- as proposed in wish #16505 -- would be of almost no help to 
me, because i do not remember unicodes of any non-ascii characters. Who 
does? Such a ALT-X shortcut is used for instance in the -- yet great -- 
/Inskscape/ free drawing software. Then, each time that a greek letter 
or another symbol must be used, we need to find its unicodes in an extra 
document (most often on internet). It's definitely not handy.

So, i would like to propose to add this new constant to Scilab, for the 
benefit of all users.
In this respect, you will find there the proposed help page for such a 
new constant <http://bugzilla.scilab.org/attachment.cgi?id=5206>.
As for now, i have named it %chars:

  * Most of existing Scilab constants have a name starting with %. We
    can keep this convention.
  * A short name is desirable, to keep it handy.

As warned in the proposed page, and as experimented during 3 years on my 
side,
Character sets provided by %chars must not be considered as fixed and 
definitive. The number of sets, their names, hierarchy, and order can 
vary in the future, as well as the order of characters in the sets. In 
addition, a given character may belong to several sets.

Every comment is welcome about such a new constant.

Best regards
Samuel


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.scilab.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20201229/5fa100e4/attachment.htm>