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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net>
> Date: Tue, 05 May 2015 16:20:50 +0000
> 
>  > So if we provide such a command, IMO we should prompt for a block of
>  > codepoints, and display only that block.
> 
>       No objection on my part, but I’d rather provide the “buttons” to
>       move to the previous and next blocks in that same buffer.

That could be okay, too, but it cannot be instead of a directly going
to a block.  Imagine going all the way to, say, the Aegean Numbers
block by clicking Next, Next, Next, ...

>       OTOH, what would it take to improve the display time in such a
>       case?

How can you improve it when fonts don't exist on the target machine?

>       Unless I be mistaken, other (as in: mainstream; think of,
>       say, Firefox) software generally /does/ handle that case
>       reasonably well.

I don't know anything about that, except that Emacs uses the same
libraries for accessing fonts.  Unfortunately, we don't have on board
an active enough maintainer who is knowledgeable about font handling
(both in general and in Emacs).  Feel free to fill the niche.

>  >> 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.
> 
>       What about NamesList.txt?

What do you mean?  NamesList.txt contains a different information, and
once again at least part of it will not be easily understood, or even
useful to most people, I think.

>  > And we already show this in human-readable form in "C-u C-x =", so we
>  > could simply reuse the same code here.
> 
>       The problem with C-u C-x = is that it describes a single
>       character a time, while it may be beneficial to see some
>       “related” (in either name or number) characters as well.

Well, loops are available...  But I very much doubt you'll be able to
display enough useful information in a single line that way.