[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 156507] Ability to remove non-printing/"atypical" characters in a stretch of text

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156507

--- Comment #9 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> ---
(In reply to ⁨خالد حسني⁩ from comment #7)
> The notion here is fundamentally flawed, there is no such thing as exotic
> characters in a multilingual and multicultural piece of software, this is
> very monolingual way of thinking.

It's not about what's not in a particular language. It's about what people
don't generate with their keyboards. Yes, that could be different for every
language; and if you can generate ZWNJ with a Persian keyboard - then ZWNJ is a
poor example, or it should be considered atypical only in certain contexts.

> Also, don’t copy text from PDF, that is your actual problem. PDF is not a
> text exchange format, despite what PDF stakeholders want to sell people.

But users have to copy text from PDFs, because they are provided PDFs rather
than original editable documents, and they need the text. (In fact, sometimes,
they need to edit the PDF in place.)

Indeed, PDF is not a text exchange format, and PDF export code may and does add
all sorts of non-printing characters, which users need to filter out. That's
the motivating use case. 


(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #8)
> expanded coverage for toggle display of non-printing and formatting
> Unicode via <Ctrl>+F10

That is unlikely to help - unless you start indicating which non-printing
character is which, and then you have something like a source view, or a
few-characters-per-line view, which doesn't look like the original text.

I agree with Khaled's observation that question of what to filter out is
non-trivial and language-dependent. But it is a (somewhat) common use-case to
want to perform such filtering.

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