[pmwiki-users] Markup for Compose?

Stirling Westrup sti at pooq.com
Wed Sep 13 11:19:06 CDT 2006


Sandy wrote:
> Stirling Westrup wrote:
>> I'm doing a survey of opinions here. Lately I've been thinking of
>> writing a recipe that allows for character composition and definition of
>> new character entities as one goes. I'm not sure what a reasonable
>> markup would be. I'm tempted to use a backslash, but I fear it would
>> interfere with existing markup. The idea would be to allow someone (like
>> me) who occasionally writes in another language, but who doesn't have a
>> keyboard that supports it, to insert accented and special characters in
>> a simple way without cutting and pasting from a character map.
>>
> 
> If you're willing to use the HTML special character listings by the w3c, 
> then it's already part of the core.

I'm not. Can you, without looking it up, remember what the official HTML
entity name is for captial-C-with-cedila? I can't. I've never had
trouble remembering that the DEC compose code is <COMPOSE>C, though.
Besides, there are many, many, many unicode code-points that aren't in
the standard. This page I am working on in my wiki has a lot of them:

  http://sti.pooq.com/Tech/UnicodeLineDrawing

There is also the case that I would far rather type something like \ae
(3 letters) than &aelig; (7 letters) if I'm going to be typing it a lot.

> The following codes both produce a Cent mark (C with line through it)
> 
> &cent;          &#162;
> &aelig; 	gives the ae ligature.
> 
> Given your example, I would expect &#x2603;  to give the snowman, but 
> either it doesn't, or my machine doesn't support it. (I've no clue 
> whether it should or not. Maybe it's because x2603 isn't in base 10? 
> Just bouncing ideas in case one sticks.)

U-2603 is the unicode snowman character. Of course, you have to have a
font installed that has that code point or you won't see anything.

> http://pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/SpecialCharactersOther
> http://pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/SpecialCharactersList
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Characters

True, but its my frustration with dealing with this that has me wanting
to create a recipe that makes it easier to work with special characters.





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list