CharacterMap Plugin V1.3

by Slava Pestov
and Mark Wickens
and Max Funk

Introduction

The character map plugin displays a window showing all ASCII and extended characters. Clicking one will insert it into the buffer.

Various encodings are supported, including full Unicode 6.1.0.

To see many Unicode characters, you may need to activate font substitution in jEdit and to install large fonts in your system.

Description

In a dockable window a character table is shown. Clicking on a character with Button 1 on the mouse (typically the left button) will cause the character to be inserted at the cursor position in the current buffer.

Additional information about the characters is given in the status line. Pressing and holding button 3 on the mouse (typically the right button) will display an enlarged version of the character overlayed at the current pointer position.

The characters in the table are rendered in the font style and size selected for the text area. The anti-alias and fractional font metrics options are honoured. Additional fonts can be used via font substitution. Activate this feature in "jEdit - Global Options - Text Area - Font Substitution". A list of preferred fonts and / or all fonts installed on the system are searched for characters. Large multi-script fonts are e.g. Code2000-2002, Quivira, Arial Unicode MS.

Beside the normal characters, there are the following entries :

  1. Blue + number: ISO control characters.
  2. White + replacement symbol: Characters with missing fonts.
  3. Green: Private Use Area: User defined characters / fonts.
  4. Grey: Not assigned to characters. For future Unicode versions and technical use.
  5. Red + replacement symbol: Invalid table entries without Unicode representation.

For the encoding "US-ASCII", the table contains 128 characters. For all other non-Unicode encodings the table contains 256 characters, that represent (often) the entire character set.

For Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) the table displays the selected unicode block, shown in the blocks combo box. By default, only the "basic multilingual plane" is shown, i.e. the first 65536 unicode characters. In the options (see below) you can activate all Unicode planes.

The encoding of the table is shown in the encoding combo box (if enabled). You can change it with the dropdown list or directly type it into the text field. Encodings typed into the text field are stored during the session, to ease later selection. You can change the content of the encoding combo box permanently in "jEdit - Global Options - Encodings - Selected Encodings".

The encoding of the current buffer / file is shown in the jEdit status line. Opening or changing a buffer resets the table to the encoding of the buffer. Character Map will refuse to insert characters from different encodings into a non-unicode buffer. If you still want to insert the character, you must change the encoding in the jEdit buffer options. Be careful: Some applications may require a specific encoding. Also, if you change to another non-Unicode encoding, some other characters of the buffer may not be present in the new encoding. Java works internally in Unicode. Codepoints from non-unicode encodings, which have no unicode equivalent, are shown in red as invalid characters. They cannot be inserted into the buffer.

Options

The following options can be specified in the option pane.

Version History

Version 1.1 (2002)

Original version.

Version 1.2 (2004)

New version of the CharacterMap plugin provides the following features - anti-aliased text, large character display, better docking support and better configuration via an options pane.

Version 1.3.0 (2011)

Improved layouts for docking. Unicode 6.0.0. Unicode detection fixed. Statusinfo fixed, UTF16, UTF32 added. Auto-reload after option change. Font substitution. Table size (Unicode) fixed. Code cleaning.

Version 1.3.1 (2012)

All Unicode planes. Change encoding / font with jEdit settings. No insertion of characters which cannot be encoded. Option panel layout. Code cleaning, better conformity to plugin standard and Java 7.

Version 1.3.2 (2012)

Alphabetic Unicode blocks. System font substitution. Encodings list updated from jEdit. Unicode 6.1.0. Colored table for invalid, unassigned and control chars. Statusinfo: Name and bytecode for all chars and encodings. Code cleaning, various small bugfixes.

Version 1.3.3 (2012)

More table colors, color options. Bugfixes: Layout for second floating window. Names of numbered chars. Unassigned chars. Super char position.