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>> Use it !

I have just upgraded the Malayalam picker to level 7, and added a bunch of new features that should show up in other pickers at level 7 as I get time:

Shape view The pickers are aimed particularly at people who are not familiar enough with a script to use the keyboard. However, there are many ligatures and conjuncts in Malayalam, which makes it difficult to identify the character sequences needed. This view provides most of the shapes you’ll see in Malayalam text, grouped by shape. It’s something I’ve been wanting to add to the pickers for some time.

Phonic view This has been done in other pickers, but it has some new features over those. The sounds have been arranged along similar lines to a standard IPA chart, and multiple transcriptions are supported. In addition, you can click on the transcription text to build up a phonemic string in IPA. This is particularly useful for creating examples.

Regular expressions in searches The search feature was upgraded to allow for regular expressions. So now you can highlight characters containing GA without highlighting ones containing NGA: just search for \bga\b (or use the convenient short-cut form .ga.). Of course you can do more complicated searches too.

Add codepoint You can add a hex codepoint value to the box in the yellow area to insert into the text. This is useful for things like the odd unusual character, or for just figuring out what a sequence of codepoints represents. You can input any number of codepoints (including surrogates) into the input box, separating them by spaces.

Chillus This version of the picker supports all Unicode 5.1 characters, including the chillu characters. Because most Malayalam fonts support the old way of inputting chillu forms, you can specify in the yellow box area what you want the output to be when clicking on a chillu letter: the pre-5.1 sequence or the new atomic character. (The default is the atomic character.)

The picker also comes with the usual set of level 7 features, such as font grid view, graphic characters, hiding of uncommon characters, optimised ordering of characters in the alphabetic view, two-tone highlighting, etc.

You can start up directly in either of the available views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, shape, phonic or fontgrid.

Enjoy.

>> See what it can do !

>> Use it !

A large amount of code was rewritten to enable data to be downloaded from the server via AJAX at the point of need. This eliminates the long wait when you start to use UniView without the database information in your cache. This means that there is a slightly longer delay when you view a new block, but the code is designed so that if you have already downloaded data, you don’t have to retrieve it again from the server.

The search mechanism was also rewritten. The regular expressions used must now be supported in both JavaScript and PHP (PHP is used if not searching within the current range). When ‘other’ is ticked, the search will look in the alternative name fields, but not in other property settings (so you can no longer use something like ;AL; to search for characters with a particular property. (Use ‘Show list’ instead.))

Removed several zero-width space characters from the code, which means that UniView now works with Google Chrome, except for some annoying display bugs that I’m not sure how to fix – for example, the first time you try to display any block you only seem to get the top line (although, if you click or drag the mouse, the block is actually there). This seems to be WebKit related, since it happens in Safari, too.

Please report any bugs to me, and don’t forget to refresh any UniView files in your cache before using the new version.