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Since the early days of computers, plain text was (once by necessity and now by convention) generally displayed using a monospace font, such that horizontal alignment and columnar formatting were sometimes done using whitespace characters. Rich text, on the other hand, may contain metadata, character formatting data (e.g. typeface, size, weight ...
Like old typewriters, plain base characters (white spaces, punctuation characters, symbols, digits, or letters) can be followed by one or more non-spacing symbols (usually diacritics, like accent marks modifying letters) to form a single printable character; but Unicode also provides a limited set of precomposed characters, i.e. characters that ...
A "manual" way of editing in an external GUI text editor is to use copy and paste.Some text editors do not support, or may not be set up to support, various special characters—Chinese characters, non-Latin letters, mathematical symbols, and so on—they are typically replaced with a character that renders as a square.
Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls.Using the (now obsolete) UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the variable-width encoding UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs.
Primarily for compatibility with earlier character sets, Unicode contains a number of characters that compose super- and subscripts with other symbols. [1] In most fonts these render much better than attempts to construct these symbols from the above characters or by using markup.
While that state could be stored in a single long consecutive array of characters, a typical text editor instead uses an alternative representation as its sequence data structure—a gap buffer, a linked list of lines, a piece table, or a rope—which makes certain string operations, such as insertions, deletions, and undoing previous edits ...
While it may seem overly complicated compared to an approach such as converting all line terminators to a single character (e.g. LF), because Unicode is designed to preserve all information when converting a text file from any existing encoding to Unicode and back (round-trip integrity), Unicode needs to make the same distinctions between line ...
In the Vim editor, in insert mode, the user first types Ctrl+V u (for codepoints up to 4 hex digits long; using Ctrl+V ⇧ Shift+U for longer), then types in the hexadecimal number of the symbol or character desired, and it will be converted into the symbol. (On Microsoft Windows, Ctrl+Q may be required instead of Ctrl+V. [15])