charpick applet from mate-applets doesn't show unicode char name

[Sergei S. Rublev]

There is a general cross-distro problem with "Character Palette" applet for MATE panels. The applet derives from Gnome2 and in Gnome2 it showed Unicode char name in pop-up title when cursor was held over each symbol.

E. g., if you hold cuscor over "—", it showed "EM DASH", if over "©", it showed "COPYRIGHT SIGN" etc.

Now in MATE it only shows the same words "Insert special character", "Insert special character", "Insert special character" over any symbol. I can't recognize invisible symbols such as NBSP with that.

I was advised at GitHub to post here: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-applets/issues/126 (there is also a screenshot)

Thanks to alexsl, he said, "to show unicode char name this applet should built with HAVE_GUCHARMAP defined and you need to have gucharmap installed. This applet can take unicode char name only from gucharmap. I think this is responsibility of your package builder to build this applet with HAVE_GUCHARMAP and gucharmap as dependency".

He later said: "applet must be built with HAVE_GUCHARMAP defined, then this applet can read char names from gucharmap. But package builders (ubuntu, fedora and may be other too) build this package without HAVE_GUCHARMAP. You can try to ask package builders to rebuild it with this option."

Can you please fix this so I feel again like in Gnome2?

[Alex (alexlsh)]

I can confirm this feature request. I tested this applet on Ubuntu 14.04.
As you can see in applet source code:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-applets/blob/master/charpick/charpick.c#L498
this applet can read char names from gucharmap if it built with defined HAVE_GUCHARMAP. It use gucharmap_get_unicode_name function to resolve char name. If it built without HAVE_GUCHARMAP, it can only show "Insert special character" for any char.

[Sergei S. Rublev (ssrublev)]

The issue is reported to be solved at GitHub and needs to be reviewed by distro maintainers who should add libgucharmap as build dependency. GitHub thread: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-applets/issues/126

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

The is fixed in mate-applets 1.18.0ubuntu1.

[Sergei S. Rublev (ssrublev)]

Thank you very much, I was waiting for years =)