Display of Emoticons and characters from Indic scripts in GVim

[Sibin Thomas]

Hi,

Is it possible to read Unicode text with characters from Indic scripts (e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0900.pdf) in GVim?

Similarly is it possible to display the emoticons (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf) embedded in Unicode text when I open such text in GVim?

If the answer to either of the above questions are "Yes", then please tell me how to display these characters in GVim in my system*.

Currently all I see are hollow square boxes and I have tried all the font options that are available via :se guifont=*. For the record, the options available to me are - Consolas, Courier, Courier New, Courier10 BT, DejaVu Sans Mono, Fixedsys, Lucida Console and Terminal.

* I work on a 64 bit Windows 7 system.

Additional info, I have the following snippet embedded in my vimrc -

if has("multi_byte")
  if &termencoding == ""
    let &termencoding = &encoding
  endif
  set encoding=utf-8
  setglobal fileencoding=utf-8
  "setglobal bomb
  set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1
endif

--
Regards,
Sibin

[Ben Fritz]

Yes, it's possible. And your settings look good. So you now need to find a font with the glyphs you want. Out of the fonts you list, I strongly suspect only DejaVu MIGHT have the ones you want, and apparently even DejaVu doesn't have them since you are seeing the "no character" box.

Time to hit an Internet search engine for a monospace font for Indic scripts.

[Arnab Bhattacharya]

No, as of now, Indic scripts are not supported well by vim.
Arnab

[Sibin Thomas]

Any comment about display of emoticons (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf)?

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Regards,
Sibin

[Ben Fritz]

On Saturday, September 7, 2013 10:52:59 AM UTC-5, Sibin wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Arnab Bhattacharya <arnabbha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > No, as of now, Indic scripts are not supported well by vim.
> >
> > Arnab
> >

Not supported WELL. Because IIUC they reshape and such depending on what surrounds them. But If a font has a glyph for it, Vim should be able to display SOMETHING besides a "no character" block. That little rectangle displayed is not Vim's fault, it's the way the font tells you it has no such character.

>
> Any comment about display of emoticons (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf)?
>

Looking at that page, I KNOW none of the fonts you listed have all those glyphs. DejaVu has a couple smiley faces but not anything else even remotely close to those.

You can see the glyphs in your font using the "charmap" application on Windows. Open it up, set to see unicode ("Group by Unicode Subrange" helps narrow down what you're looking for, or you can search), and take a look at what's actually in each of those fonts.

Good luck finding one...please post back if you do. I searched for a few minutes and only got a few pages saying that there aren't any general purpose fonts containing those characters.

[glts]

On Saturday, September 7, 2013 11:26:39 PM UTC+2, Ben Fritz wrote:
> On Saturday, September 7, 2013 10:52:59 AM UTC-5, Sibin wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Arnab Bhattacharya <arnabbha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > No, as of now, Indic scripts are not supported well by vim.
> > >
> > > Arnab
> > >
>
> Not supported WELL. Because IIUC they reshape and such depending on what surrounds them. But If a font has a glyph for it, Vim should be able to display SOMETHING besides a "no character" block. That little rectangle displayed is not Vim's fault, it's the way the font tells you it has no such character.

That's a tad too apologetic for my taste. I have never been able to work
with Indic scripts in Vim. You might get a base character to be
displayed correctly, but things get mangled quickly once you add the
diacritic vowels and ligatures to the mix. What's worse, the cursor
tends to jump around unpredictably when editing Indic text.

But maybe your setup works better.

[Ben Fritz]

No, my setup doesn't work any better, actually. I have no knowledge of anything but U.S. English and the little bit of Latin and Japanese I remember from high school and college respectively. But the OP says he sees nothing but empty boxes, i.e. the "no character" glyph. I'm pointing out that THAT particular problem is because the font being used simply does not have a representation for those characters. THAT part of the problem is not Vim's fault.

I gather that even if the OP finds a good Indic font (sorry if that is misusing the term), Vim won't present it very well. But at the very least the blank "no character" boxes should go away.

Vim shouldn't have trouble displaying the emoticons anyway, if you can find a monospace font for them. They might be a little difficult to make out, if your font size is too small, but they should be displayed at least.