Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Yuri Khan]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 6:11 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

>   > When looking for confusables, you don’t want to fold. You want to make
>   > letters of different scripts stand out, e.g. by font-locking.
>
> That might be a good feature, but the devil is in the details.
> Would you like to discuss possible details here?

No.

> Meanwhile, I don't think it has to be one or the other.
> It might be good to do both.

What specific user scenario do you want to solve by folding
Latin/Greek/Cyrillic confusables?

> It might be difficult to design a convention to distinguish
> Latin a and Cyrillic a with fonts _all the time_.

There is no reason to distinguish them _all the time_. For convenient
reading, they should in fact be indistinguishable. The reader knows
from the surrounding context which letters are Latin and which are
Cyrillic.

It is when you are proof-reading text that it becomes important to
distinguish Latin and Cyrillic, to check that you don’t have a stray
Cyrillic letter within an English word, or vice-versa. (For that
matter, in this same mode it becomes important to distinguish various
kinds of Unicode spaces, hyphen/en dash/em dash/minus/figure dash,
degree sign/masculine ordinal, empty set/Latin letter o with stroke,
etc. A trained eye and a specially designed font goes a long way.)

> So here's an idea:
> when you search for Latin a and it finds Cyrillic a, it could put a special
> font or color (this tty has no fonts) on the Cyrillic a
> to show it matched as a confusable.  Likewise, if you search for Cyrillic a
> and it finds Latin a, it would put that same font on the Latin a.
>
> This needs just one font or color -- to indicate a confusable in search.

That’s assuming we *do* want to fold confusables. I’d like to know a
use case first.