Re: OT: collage of scripts [was: Re: table alignment failed for Asian char

[brian powell <briangpowellms@gmail.com>]

* One of my favorite Hofstadter books is: "Le Ton beau de Marot: In
Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0-465-08645-4), published by
Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he
explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation."

** "Translation between frames of reference — languages, cultures,
modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and
another — becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter
has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference,
structure and function, and artificial intelligence."

** This topic correctly has been labeled "OT"; but, on the subject of
translation and "modes of expression" (in the OrgMode table); this is
related to the original thread/topic: "table alignment failed for
Asian chars."--getting back there for a moment:

*** Are there any Asian/Chinese/Tamil character sets that have fixed
widths?  Chinese writing is "picture writing", where characters
actually represent, to varying degrees, a picture or an abstract
concept of the thing they represent.

**** I remember many years ago, suggesting to fellow software
engineers, that they do just that: Make fixed-width Tamil character
sets that will work well in EMACS.

* One possibly simple "work-around" (not sure this is what you seek):
Put all your non-fixed width Asian characters into cells like:
"[[blahAsianCharactersOrPNGofAsianChars][A]]"

** All you'd see is an "A" and then the table will look "covered down"
(in an OrgMode buffer)--but you may have to manually adjust the
OrgMode table.

*** Another idea: you just put something like AAAAA555 (simple
PlainText--maybe the unicode string equivalent like: "U+024B62") in
the table and have a program that replace the PlainText  U+024B62 with
the AsianChars and/or a .PNG picture file link when you click an
icon/run the program.  There are ELISP programs which help with
inserting "glyphs" that you could use and/or extend this hash array:

**** Excerptions from "unichars.el":
(defvar unicode-character-list
  '(
    ;Codept   Unicode name                            ISO Name
    (#x000000 "NULL"                                   nil     )
...
   (#x00fb92 "ARABIC LETTER GAF ISOLATED FORM"        nil     )
    (#x00fb93 "ARABIC LETTER GAF FINAL FORM"           nil     )
    (#x00fb94 "ARABIC LETTER GAF INITIAL FORM"         nil     )
    (#x00fb95 "ARABIC LETTER GAF MEDIAL FORM"          nil     )
    (#x00fb96 "ARABIC LETTER GUEH ISOLATED FORM"       nil     )
...
***** See this wonderful extension/new take on this too:
http://proofgeneral.inf.ed.ac.uk/releases/ProofGeneral-3.7/x-symbol/lisp/x-symbol-unichars.el
--so suggest looking at x-symbol-unichars.el, unichars.el and maybe
x-symbol.el and maybe then input UNICODE "glyphs" into your table.
Can you extend it to Asian/Chinese/Tamil chars?
(I don't see any in the files x-symbol-unichars.el, unichars.el, x-symbol.el)

*** Last idea: I've put ticker-tape .GIF files in EMACS OrgMode
buffers--you could put an infinite scrolling ticker tape of AsianChars
in fixed-width .GIF files with say a 16x16 pixel window (or wider) and
then know a priori that the table would remain covered down--when you
view it in an EMACS OrgMode buffer--regardless of what text you put in
it (This is probably not what you want though--but if you are doing a
presentation or tutorial of some sort and you want to show your table
with scrolling notes in table cells, then it can work for you--I've
done it.)  You can use ImageMagick to create the .GIF files--of the
scrolling Asian text.


_ ElBaradei,  3 minutes ago:
  ١٠ شهور قبل إحالة قضية الشهيد سيد بلال
  للجنايات المتهم فيها ٥ من ضباط أمن الدولة هرب
  معظمهم الى الخارج. شئ مخزى // from Twitter for
  iPad [Cairo, Egypt]


On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jambunathan wrote:
>>
>> Book seems like an interesting read. For me to go from frame message ->

> The wikipedia page:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Douglas_Hofstadter#Inspirational
>