Re: Display hide a char ?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Thu, 07 Mar 2002 19:45:57 +0100
  "Bram Moolenaar" wrote:
> 
> Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> 
> > > It sounds similar to what is done for composing characters.  You might
> > > want to look into that code.  This means moving the "B" to become a
> > > composing character of "A", which together form "C".  Then the code that
> > > knows about this is restricted to where composing characters are
> > > handled.
> > 
> > Its not at all similar in the sense that we are not asked to superimpose
> > those two glyphs (which is what composing characters tend to do).  So the
> > idea is somewhat similar conceptually, but the execution of it is far from
> > being the same.  The 'C' in question is a completely different glyph in
> > its own right (again this is only to be done on display).  If I'm jumping
> > to conclusions, do let me know.
> 
> It's the same in the sense that two characters are put in the space of
> one character.  It's not too difficult to replace the glyph in the
> functions that handle displaying composing characters.
> 
> What might complicate the matter is that the current checks for
> composing characters only need to check the character itself.  For
> replacing "AB" with "C" you also need to check the character before "B"
> to decide that "B" is not to be displayed as a second character.

Fair enough - after sending the previous mail I came to the same
conclusion with one rather unfortunate side affect.  The deletion of
'C' will delete both 'A' and 'B' which is not what's supposed to happen
(ideally, the deletion of 'C' should revert you back to seeing just 'A'),
but looking at how things have progressed I guess we'll have to live with
this misfeature and simply adapt around it.

> I don't think that letting away characters is a useful generic feature.
> Only for arabic does it appear to be useful.

The same approach could be used in any future hidden format insertion.
In any regard, only time will tell - I'll drop the issue :-)

Thanks...

 - Nadim


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