Follow-up on ‘ASCII Transliteration without ICU or iconv’

In a recent blog posting I presented some code on how to transliterate common Unicode characters into ASCII-only representations using a offline-generated lookup table to avoid dependencies on ICU which would normally do this job.

By an anonymous commenter, I got pointed to that Unicode (in Qt) is slightly more complicated than I had considered when writing the code: I missed to handle planes beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and the ‘surrogates’ between code points 0xD800 and 0xDFFF. In a series of recently pushed Git commits I addressed problem of surrogates and fixed some more issues. Some preparatory work has been done to support more planes in the future, but as of now, only the BMP is supported. For details, please have a look at the five commits posted on 2019-10-12.

Rudimentary KBibTeX client using Kirigami2

KBibTeX is a bibliography editor (BibTeX and somewhat BibLaTex) used in conjunction with LaTeX and friends. Based on this code base, a SailfishOS client called ‘BibSearch’ exists which allows to search for bibliographic data in various online sources (IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, …). BibSearch's code makes use of KBibTeX's C++ code, has its user interface implemented in SailfishOS's Silica QML, and provides just two C++ files on its own to glue together everything.

It has long been my goal to provide a QML or Kirigami-based client of KBibTeX of similar functionality, either to be used as Plasma widget or for Plasma Mobile (thus equivalent to the SailfishOS implementation). Finally I have been able to put together an initial implementation using Kirigami2. There are several rough edges and bugs, and much of the intended functionality is missing, but at least one can search for bibliographic data. If you are familiar with Kirigami, it should be a low-hanging fruit to fix the obvious issues, especially given that there is already a Silica-based client as reference. Code contributions to branch feature/kirigami are welcome!