Re: [ jEdit-users ] CharacterMap Plugin Update

[Mike M. <ma...@um...>]

Jesse Pavel wrote:
> I've made slight updates to the CharacterMap plugin so that it
> recognizes the various UTF-XX encodings that jEdit currently uses, as
> valid Unicode encodings.

The plugin renders the characters in the table using the font selected 
for the text area.  Which reminds me of a troublesome limitation of 
jEdit: I can only use one font at a time.

In my work, I need to use multiple fonts, because I have multilingual 
XML documents that use multiple scripts--for example, Bengali and 
English, or Arabic and English.  And I have found no decent monospaced 
fonts that cover such ranges, and for that matter few decent fonts of 
any sort that would work.  (There are well known problems for rendering 
such scripts, e.g. context-sensitive display of characters.  By no means 
do I expect that kind of support in a programming editor; I'd be happy 
to get the glyph that represents each code point on the Unicode pages. 
I don't even need right-to-left scripts to display properly, although it 
would be nice.)

I suppose this will strike most readers of this list as a bizarre wish 
(I won't even call it a request).  There are, after all, editors like 
Yudit that do such things; why don't I use one of those?  Well, there 
are good reasons, like jEdit is one of the best programmer's editors 
now, and the alternatives aren't really programmer's editors.

Java does have some built-in support for displaying (and even rendering) 
multiple fonts, see e.g. 
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/fontconfig.html.  I have 
used this in other Java-based applications (like XMLmind); is there a 
good reason why jEdit can't do this?

    Mike Maxwell