glyphless characters

[Manuel Berri]

Hi fellow notepadd++ addicts,

I would like to know if there is a way (a plug-in perhaps ?) to have NotePad++ display non-graphic characters (such as the private use area characters) by mean of an hexadecimal code within a square instead of just an empty square.
If not, then it’s a pity: notePad ++ should be able to replace glyphless characters by their codepoint (see me coming with a request-for-feature ?)

Kind regards,

[dail]

This isn’t possible as far as I know. Notepad++ uses Scintilla for all the lower level character handling and display. So any feature request would have to be made to that project.

[auralarch]

How about using a font for this instead?
(I can’t predict the potential viability this solution without knowledge of your goals/objectives.)

I wish I could remember the name of—or find— a (series of) font(s) I encountered this summer which had a glyph for each valid code point consisting of its hex ID, encased in a box with a watermark of an iconic character identifying/representing the script or unicode block.

Although, I haven’t managed to uncover a way of configuring default fonts (based on script) or designating a fallback font in npp—if it exists…

I know I’m not providing much, but it is an idea/starting point which I hope can help someone.

[PeterJones]

If you know all of the code-points you want, you can do it through Python Script. For example, see this other thread, where I show how to include four zero-width characters in a visibility-toggle.

However, if you want all 6400 characters in the BMP U+E000…U+F8FF range, or all the characters in the two 64K PUP ranges, I would recommend a loop…

for codepoint in range(0xE000, 0xF8FF):
    editor.setRepresentation(unichr(codepoint),hex(codepoint))

(And a similar loop for the PUP ranges, if desired)

Hope this helps.