[Bug 139107] Availability of non-printing Unicode special characters should not depend upon the font

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139107

Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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           Keywords|                            |needsUXEval
                 CC|                            |libreoffice-ux-advise at lists
                   |                            |.freedesktop.org

--- Comment #7 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> ---
(In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #6)

Insert > Formatting Marks only offers some of the available control characters
/ formatting marks. Just for bidirectional control alone there are 12 control
chars; the menu has just two. Do you suggest they all be added? And then - what
about control characters from here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes

even just the 12 will make the menu already deterring for many/most users. It's
a good idea, IMHO, that it only offers some marks.

> On the other hand, there is the dialog in question, that is intended to show
> what is there in the fonts. And nothing else.

That's really not true. This is the "Insert > Special Character..." dialog, not
"Insert > Font Glyph..." ; users justifiably expect to be able to insert any
special character from that dialog, without having to determine whether some
typeface artificially contains that character or not.

Moreover, even if the dialog only said "character", and even if the Formatting
Marks actually included RLO/LOR - it is still legitimate and reasonable to have
cross-coverage of functionality from different parts of the UI. It's ok if the
user found their way to the special character via browsing the Unicode ranges -
and we should not hinder their desire to then say "ok, I want to put one of
these in my document".

> The issue may be its (and its command) title "Special Character(s)" - which
> has always confused me: it's not about anything special, it's about any
> characters of specific fonts.

It has been implemented that way. This bug report requires a change in that
implementation, and that change is merited IMHO. This can be achieved without
worsening or slowing down the workflow for users looking for glyphs/symbols.

> But anyway: this request to add non-existing elements to fonts

We should definitely implement this in a way which does not confuse users about
this fact. That can happen in multiple ways, e.g. :

1. Toggle/checkbox for searching for glyphs in fonts vs non-printing control
characters where the font doesn't matter.
2. Some kind of visual indication that a control character in the table is
presented, and can be inserted, irrespective of whether than font "has it" or
not. maybe some inner frame, or background hatching, or color triangle at a
corner etc.

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