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

[Samuel Gougeon]

Le 31/12/2020 à 10:36, Antoine Monmayrant a écrit :
> On 29/12/2020 16:39, Samuel Gougeon wrote:
>> 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.
> I agree with you here.
> It is not a good idea to use such a shortcut that replicates what is 
> already present at the OS level: on linux for example Crtl+Alt+Maj+u 
> allows to type the unicode of a character (like 3BB for λ). Equivalent 
> shortcuts exist under Windows and MacOS.
>
> From my personal experience, my preferred implementation is the one 
> used by Julia: type the LaTeX macro (like \lambda for λ) then Tab and 
> you get the unicode character.
> I assume implementation something like that in Scilab is quite a lot 
> of work...
>
> Your proposition might be a good compromise between ease of 
> implementation and usefulness.
>

Thank you for your input and for supporting the proposal, Antoine.

About any shortcut proposal, may i add that, yes it would be a more 
general solution than the selected characters in %chars. But while 
getting an external document referencing unicodes of some requested 
symbols, i don't see any reason to get the unicodes and use the 
shortcut, instead of directly copying the character from this external 
document and copying it wherever it is needed in Scilab or elsewhere, as 
in a documentation page edited with Notepadd++ for instance.
Therefore, the right external document to select is not a document 
listing unicodes, but more simply a document listing characters sets 
rendered without gif or other images. Before implementing this %chars, 
it was what i used to do.

I am not sure that implementing the Julia solution with LaTeX would 
improve a lot the situation:

  * first, we still have to remember a code, the latex one ; this is
    simple for common characters, but get harder and harder for less
    frequent ones. While a selection among displayed/rendered characters
    do not need to remember any code. I have written 700 pages in LaTeX
    without wysiwym software like LyX, and hopefully i had always a hand
    on "A Guide to LaTeX-2e"  and its tables of illustrated codes to get
    the right one.
  * Moreover, we can put in %chars some characters that have no LaTeX code.
  * Finally, implementing a LaTeX shortcut could not be used when
    editing the documentation out of the console and Scinotes, except to
    render the character in order to then, anyway, copy/paste it
    wherever needed.

So, to me, the main purposes are

  * to stop having to remember any code for the -- say 500 or 1000 --
    most used characters, when no complex expression is required.
  * to stop having to search in an external document when working with
    Scilab
  * and possibly, to present classes of characters, what can help
    finding the required one.

Beyong this current topic and the trivial implementation of %chars, it 
could then even be useful to have an easy way to get the LaTeX code from 
a selected character, instead of the opposite!

Regards
Samuel


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