I’ve been wanting to improve the editing behaviour of my pickers for quite some time, so that users could interact more easily with the keyboard, and insert characters into the middle of a composition, not just at the end. In fact, the output area maintains the focus all the time, now – which makes a major improvement to the usability of the pickers.
This week I made those things happen, and created a new template with some other changes, too.
An updated Bengali picker is first out of the box, but look out for a brand new Urdu-specific picker to follow close on its heels. I will retrofit the new template to other pickers as time allows, or need dictates.
I also beefed up the font selection list with a large number of TT and OT fonts, and improved the reference material at the bottom.
I improved the mechanism that highlights similar characters, to give more fine-grained control to the associations between characters.
I also added a field just under the title that gives information about the character the user is mousing over, and added a search field to help users find characters for which they know the Unicode name or number. I plan to extend the information associated with characters in future to include native names (eg. e-kar) and other useful search info.
I also changed the scripting and HTML so that a single click can now produce multiple characters in the composition field. This will allow users to input ligatures like the indic ‘ksha’ or Urdu aspirated consonants, or complex sequences tied to ligatures (like the word ‘Allah’) with a simple click.
Some things have also been removed. There is no DEL button now, since you can interact more easily with the keyboard for that. Spaces are available from the (now rationalised) character area, rather than a button. And there is no longer an option to switch between graphics and characters for the selection. This is partly for simplicity, and partly to make it easier to represent some of the slightly more complicated selection options I want to add in future – for example, specific shapes are appropriate for Urdu arabic characters, and I don’t want to leave it to chance as to whether the user’s system has the right fonts to produce the desired shapes.
Getting to this actually required a huge amount of unseen work, since I had to wrap all the images in button markup and move and change attributes, etc. so that the composition box retains the focus in IE (it worked fine for Firefox, Opera and Safari). I also, of course, made significant, but probably not noticeable, changes to the Javascript and CSS.