<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p><font size="+1">Dear Scilabers,</font></p>
<font size="+1">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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9221">wish 9221</a>,
or more recently as the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16505">wish
16505</a> (July 2020).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</font><br>
<font size="+1">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.<br>
Then, displaying the constant in the console, and copying/pasting
selected characters from the display is straightforward, and
always available.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 -- <i>Inskscape</i> 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.<br>
<br>
So, i would like to propose to add this new constant to Scilab,
for the benefit of all users.<br>
In this respect, you will find <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://bugzilla.scilab.org/attachment.cgi?id=5206">there
the proposed help page for such a new constant</a>.<br>
As for now, i have named it %chars:</font>
<ul>
<li><font size="+1">Most of existing Scilab constants have a name
starting with %. We can keep this convention.</font></li>
<li><font size="+1">A short name is desirable, to keep it handy.</font></li>
</ul>
<font size="+1">As warned in the proposed page, and as experimented
during 3 years on my side,<br>
<span class="fontstyle0">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.</span> <br style="
font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2;
text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform:
none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
">
</font><br>
<font size="+1">Every comment is welcome about such a new constant.</font>
<p><font size="+1">Best regards</font><br>
<font size="+1">Samuel</font><br>
</p>
<br>
</body>
</html>