Re: [Gramps-devel] making NBSP visible

[Paul F. <pf....@gm...>]

On 7/7/17, Paul Culley <pau...@gm...> wrote:
> I'm hardly an expert, but I have done some searching and I cannot find any
> obvious way to just show nbsp and other hidden punctuation marks using Gtk
> facilities.

That's too bad.  (I have heard them called "format effectors"
also, but I am not sure that's right.)

> So I expect that we would have to do some work ourselves.  Probably we
> should look at substituting certain characters with others as the easiest
> mechanism.

I could believe that, too.  But I'm guessing we'd only need
to do it to display them, not store them in the DB (or XML).

> Msoft Word seems to use the following when showing hidden characters:
> space: interpunct u+00B7 '·'
> nbsp: degree sign, U+00B0 '°'
> tab: one of the right arrows U+2192 '→' (this might not be right, it is not
> an exact match)
> paragraph: pilcrow U+00B6 '¶'
>
> I looked at LibreOffice and it appeared to use a colored space for the
> nbsp; seems this would be more difficult to implement, we would have to use
> markup type text displays and do a markup in our substitutions.
>
> Just some thoughts.

Thank you for doing the checking.  I appreciate it.

Personally, I will happily accept any solution which
seems possible to implement, and which somehow
gives our users the feedback some might want.  But
I suggest it should be a preference ("show non-printing
characters" maybe, say in Edit=>Preferences=>Display).

I'm not sure about tab being shown as a right-arrow though,
as right-arrow is already used in gramps, somewhere (IIRC).

Does Word show a linefeed?  The bug Jerome cited was a
user copying-and-pasting and including a linefeed accidentally.

Thanks again.