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Is there a text editor/notes app that adds Unicode symbols? (feddit.de)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For example, there is Material Notes which has a editor toolbar with bold, indented, ~~stroke~~, etc. But this is rendered, exported to json or syntax like Markdown. This app too, in which i write this on lemmy, does the same. We have ☐, ☒, •, ‣ in Unicode, 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱, 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵, so why not use this?

Basically, what i'm looking for is a text editor with toolbar/keystrokes for Android or Linux, which adds unicode symbols for rich text. It would make reading plain text notes/todo lists cross-device simpler. Yes, there's UnicodePad and Charmap but that's not the same.

edit: something where you mark a word, tap the B in the toolbar or press ctrl+b and it replaces the characters with uc bold characters, no? Tap the list button and it adds uc bullet points, etc...

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[–] asap 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

If you know Javascript you could very easily write a plugin in Obsidian to do this. Just have the plugin replace any markdown with the Unicode equivalent on save.

Great question though, it's actually making me wonder why this isn't a thing in normal plain text editors!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because it's not actually a good idea.

You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for "Bold". You'll see the example from OP doesn't get picked up, because it's not a B, it's a 𝗕. And it's not an o, it's an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: "s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵". Now, stroke isn't a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it's not stroke. It's s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.

It's also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won't know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.

And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.

These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They're stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

This here is the best answer, i'd like to add:

Just use Markdown or Org-mode and then export to HTML. Most devices should have a browser capable of display this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Great question though, it's actually making me wonder why this isn't a thing in normal plain text editors!

Right? Why make the text editor Unicode capable but not implement this? Are we too stuck in the xml ways?