The Special Characters dialog needs to be better at supporting a search. I'd like to search by character name, Unicode identifier, hex position, and decimal position. It's easier to get an em-dash by going to Wikipedia's article about the dash and copying the character for pasting. I found U+2012 through U+2015 in the DejaVu Serif font General Punctuation subset, but I don't know which one is the em-dash. The vertical scroll bar is confusing. I expect more characters in the font's subset, but dragging the scroll bar down counterintuitively takes me to another font if the font menu is preselected or to another subset if the subset menu is preselected. Although the menu item is appropriately named, the dialog is misnamed; clearly it includes nonspecial characters, like 0–9, A–Z, and a–z, as well as special ones. I'd just name it Characters. I'm running LibreOffice 4.2.8.2, which is still being updated even if it is at EOL. If these features have been added to the latest LibreOffice version, that's good enough. I guessed my hardware.
Hello Nick, We have plans to improve on the special characters dialog, which can be seen here. http://user-prompt.com/libreoffice-design-session-special-character/ I'm assuming it covers all the suggestions you've made.
Yes, except the scroll issue, which I've since brought there, by adding into the existing topic. Thanks.
The scroll issue is not reproducible for me. What operating system are you running on? Is it possible to send in a screencast so we can see this behaviour in action.
Set to NEEDINFO while we wait for further information.
Created attachment 114893 [details] screencast when font menu active
Created attachment 114895 [details] screencast when subset menu active
Partly still the case; partly my error. I figured out what's happening. My laptop's touchpad supports scrolling by my dragging two spread-apart fingers down the touchpad, and scrollbars usually deal with that as if I had mouse-dragged the scroll bar down. So I got used to doing that and thinking of it as mousing (my laptop has no mouse). However, the Special Characters dialog deals with the two dragging methods differently. The two-finger touchpadding got the effect I described that you couldn't replicate, and I uploaded screencasts of it.
Hi Nick, Thanks for the screencasts. I checked the same with my laptop touchpad and could only reproduce your behaviour when the mouse is outside of the boundaries of character list control and the font drop down is selected, which it is when you first open the dialog. I believe the solution to this is that the character list control should be the one with focus when the dialog opens up. This is the behaviour other word processors.
I think the Special Characters dialog should including a input box to let user searching character by exact name or codepoint.
(In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #9) > I think the Special Characters dialog should including a input box to let > user searching character by exact name or codepoint. BabelMap[1] and BabelPad[2] have implemented this method. [1] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html [2] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html
(In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #9) > I think the Special Characters dialog should including a input box to let > user searching character by exact name or codepoint. Yes searching by a character's name is part of the extended proposal. If codepoint is the character's unicode number, that will be implemented in the basic proposal. (In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #10) > BabelMap[1] and BabelPad[2] have implemented this method. > > [1] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html > [2] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html I dont think LO needs to fully compete with Character Map apps.
(In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #9) > I think the Special Characters dialog should including a input box to let > user searching character by exact name or codepoint. (In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #10) > (In reply to General Kutuzov from comment #9) > > I think the Special Characters dialog should including a input box to let > > user searching character by exact name or codepoint. > > BabelMap[1] and BabelPad[2] have implemented this method. > > [1] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html > [2] http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html OK, the current version of LibreOffice can do it.
Yes the 5.1 release now adds ascii and hexadecimal searching in the dialog. I'm closing this as a duplicate of the main bug that is pursuing the fixes mentioned in the blog post. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 34882 ***