Re: dictionary for TeX,/ConTeXt

[Idris Samawi Hamid <ishamid@colostate.edu>]

> It has nothing to do with keyboard, only with the software use use.
> But, hmmm, see ... http://www.winedt.org/poll.php

>
> Unicode support is one of the "which features do you miss most?", so it 
> doesn't really look promising, at least not yet.

Ok, I voted, but I actually corresponded with the developer (Alex) a few 
months ago and this is what he said:
========================
I am afraid that UNICODE will not be supported just yet. In part,
because I am overwhelmed with feature requests (including requests
for Linux versions) and I just cannot keep up with it - WinEdt is
still a one-programmer project. The other reason is that Delphi 7
still does not support UNICODE in its controls (VCL) and that would
require quite some low level programming or shopping for third party
unicode compatible VCL extensions. Finally, the request for UNICODE
among WinEdt users at the moment is still moderate and since
implementation is non-trivial and requires a lot of testing it is
not top priority.

If/when I embark on a new major version of WinEdt I'll take UNICODE
and BiDi support into design consideration from start. Right now it
would be a lot of patching and more problems that I can handle. But
I would like to rewrite WinEdt and fix the problems that were
inherited from the original design (from 1993) when computers were
slow, memory was low and Windows 3.1 crashed regularly...
========================

> vim supports UTF (I have problems typing UTF under windows) and most 
> advanced text editors should support it also; I use scite for 
> (Con)TeX(t) in unicode recently. I've just found 
> http://dev.remotenetworktechnology.com/SciTE/WordCheck.vbs.txt on 
> internet, which is probably exactly the thing Ciro was looking for, but 
> I wasn't able to execute it, maybe I have some programs missing.
>

In any case, I don't think there is any Unicode/bidi editor better than 
UniPad

http://www.unipad.org/main/

Absolutely no TeX-friendly features, so I now edit my Arabic in UniPad and 
do TeX in WinEdt. In particular, UniPad (Unicode 4.0 compliant)

(1) handles virtually all accents and diacritics (whereas most editors 
with some unicode/bidi support do not support all needed Arabic accents); 
and

(2) implements these in a most innovative/friendly one-dimensional 
fashion, (unlike all others, in which it is a pain to edit accents and 
diacritics--due to their 2-dimensional nature);

I mention this in detail because if the scite people decide to implement 
some unicode support, then UniPad is the best paradigm to look at, 
particularly for bidi and Arabic accents. If Hans or anyone else has 
influence with the Scite developers, please pass this on, and I'll be 
happy to help anyone interested in the Arabic aspects of bidi-unicode 
implementation (testing, etc.).

Best
Idris

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523