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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 05 May 2015 10:38:53 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: 20499@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
>    > > Would admin/unidata/UnicodeData.txt do?
> 
> It doesn't do the job, becuase it doesn't contain the characters
> themselves.

You mean, the glyphs?  (It does show the codepoint, so you can easily
display the character via "C-x 8 RET".)

As for showing the glyphs, visiting a file with large number of
characters runs a high risk of being an annoyance due to the
corresponding fonts being unavailable on the system.  E.g., "C-h H",
which only shows a small part of those, takes 4 sec on my system with
an optimized build, and about 6 in a non-optimized build.

So if we provide such a command, IMO we should prompt for a block of
codepoints, and display only that block.

> If you type RET on a character, it should visit
> admin/unidata/UnicodeData.txt and move to the corresponding line.

I'm not sure showing UnicodeData.txt in its raw form will be useful.
Most people won't know how to interpret the attributes encoded there,
about the only understandable parts are the codepoint and the name.
And we already show this in human-readable form in "C-u C-x =", so we
could simply reuse the same code here.