File display using multiple fonts simultaneously?

PeterJones

@M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode said in File display using multiple fonts simultaneously?:

… did not actively show the extra invisible characters until …

As @Alan-Kilborn said, I don’t think it suddenly appearing after toggling that particular setting had anything to do with that particular setting.

My theory: you needed to force Notepad++ to redraw the current window, and toggling the Notepad+±controlled character visibility is one such way. I know in the past, I had the setRepresentation and similar commands seemingly not work because of that.

It might help to add something like,

p = editor.getCurrentPos()
editor.addText(u'Z\uFEFFZ')
editor.deleteRange(p, editor.getCurrentPos() - p)

to the end of the script, which adds the character (and some others) then immediately deletes them, which might trigger the redraw.

Or maybe use

notepad.new()
notepad.close()

which will create a new tab with a new file, then immediately close it… which should force a redraw on the active window that has the special characters

Alan Kilborn

I think the script is OK the way it is.
I tested having the script active and changing the View > Show symbol options to various selections.
I always saw things shown that corresponded to the menu items as well as the special representations the script is doing.
Thus, I don’t know what happened for the OP, but for me at least everything is fine the way it is.

PeterJones

@Alan-Kilborn ,

Yes, it usually does work right. I’ve just seen rare occasions when setRepresentation or other such code didn’t immediately update in the display, where forcing a re-draw then makes it look right. I have a feeling that this strange outlier situation is the circumstance the OP has found himself in.

In my day job of programming finicky electronic systems to do specific things, I have found (more often than I like) that even though I’m doing everything I should have to do, it doesn’t start behaving the way I expect it to until I “kick it” with something that shouldn’t matter (akin to my recommendation of opening and closing a new tab), so this is a debug/kluge technique that is now in my toolbox, even in non-physical programming.

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Alan-Kilborn

The script is NOT intended to be run multiple times, say, in order to toggle the feature on/off. If this is desired, we can tweak the script

I wouldn’t mind seeing such a feature, but it’s fine without it. I’d sooner have it also reveal the following code points when the encoding is ANSI/cp1252, which I actually use more often than Unicode:

129, 141, 143, 144, 157 = All undefined in NPP’s character panel, and everywhere else I’ve consulted.

160 = Non-breaking space

Perhaps it was a coincidence; you just thought that was what you saw happen?

Maybe, but I’m not worried about it enough to investigate.

I think Show All Characters is bad UI text, because of what it implies

I agree, and have thought the same thing.

One email correspondent of mine often sends messages that have ASCII non-breaking spaces in them, which he claims to have no idea why they’re in there, but it trips me up when editing quoted text in my replies, as I often use Ctrl-Left Arrow and Ctrl-Right Arrow to navigate horizontally, and it ends up skipping over multiple words that are only separated by NBS.

@PeterJones

It might help to add something like,
Or maybe use

I’ll keep them in mind, thanks. It’s actually not that big of a deal.