I'm simply saying that life^H^H^H^Hcharacters, uh... find a way

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/12 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/12/6139309.aspx

I suppose the dammit makes it sound like hardball, sorry about that, Jan. :-)

There are numerous ways to enter them -- from MSKLC keyboards to IMEs to Word's Insert Symbol dialog to Text Services Framework TIPs to copy/paste from web pages.

All of which are (from the user's point of view) is just a single character, a.k.a. a supplementary character (or as young Dean would call it, a surrogateS character)....

Though to give a meta-answer to the question, and believe me I hate to get all Jurassic Park on y'all, but I'm simply saying that characters, uh... find a way. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that characters will not be contained. Characters break free, expand to new territory, and crash through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.

This post brought to you by 𠀀 (U+20000, the first CJK Extension B ideograph)

"Not that I wouldn't love an enhanced Character Map at some point."

Something like this?

http://www.mihai-nita.net/article.php?artID=charmapex

(ok, missing some of the stuff in the real CharMap, but also with some extras)

Not as hard as you might think, Michael, since I was somewhat aware of this stuff (thanks to your blog ;-)) and only poorly stated the question... (softened also by the fact that I had to ensure what the dammit stands for :-D)

Well, I opened the character map only to avoid answer making me feel really silly (as this happens more often than I would like to), and upon openning I thought, this is not going to be here...

So the question should probably be... umm... how to enter these surrogate pairs? Or surrogates character, I like this one as well. :)

You suggested some ways and although I can't make Word's Insert Symbol dialog to do it, after installing Japanese keyboard, I found these in IME Pad. Text Services Framework require a little bit investigation from my side.

Anyway, thank you for good answer to my bad question. I hope it will get better.

Jan

PS. I too would like some changes in the in-box Character Map. It seems to me a little bit forgotten, though not as much as the Add Font dialog. :)

Mihai, add a search feature, this adds the Character Map a lot of usability (although the UI for it is very poor).

"Mihai, add a search feature, this adds the Character Map a lot of usability (although the UI for it is very poor)."

Thanks, sounds interesting. But search for what?

And I would like to hear more about any UI improvements idea.

But let's move this on my site :-)

If you want, use the contact page, that will send me an email, and we get in touch directly.

Thanks!