bug#20499: [PROPOSED PATCH] C-x 8 shorthands for curved quotes, , Euro, etc.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>,  rms@gnu.org,  20499@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 11:52:40 -0400
> 
> > IOW, the above selection is highly filtered using some unspecified
> > rules, and therefore it at best emulates a use case where the user has
> > a pretty good knowledge about what she wants to find.  And still, you
> > need to select out of about 300 characters.
> 
> > How's that workable, except in very simple use cases?
> 
> It's workable in the following way:
> - first time around, you'll have to scan all those chars, which will
>   take a little while.
> - second time around you'll also have to scan them, but it will take
>   a bit less time.
> - ...
> - Nth time around, you'll either know more or less where the char is so
>   you don't need to scan all those chars any more, or you'll have
>   learned some other way to insert the char.
> 
> That's what I do every once in a while using the symbols.dvi document,
> looking for how to enter some funny-looking math symbols in LaTeX.

I admire your patience.  When I need to do this, I generally give up
in despair very quickly.  And unless I need the same character over
and over again, my Nth time looks very similar to my first.

> And I agree that further refinement (such as restricting the display to
> those glyphs that have an "e" in them, which would include all the
> weirdly accented forms of "e" and probably the upper case forms as
> well) would be a nice addition.

I can try writing a back-end (that thing that takes a list of criteria
and returns a list of codepoints or ranges to display) for this, if
someone will then add a UI for the user to specify the constraints and
for display of the results.

> E.g. it would be great to be able to say "it's char that has a > in its
> glyph" and then be presented with things like ≥, right angle brackets,
> right arrows, ...

Yep.