For math accents, it's easy since the base is the argument of the accent operator. But for clusters the standard practice is for the Delete key to delete the whole cluster as you note. Also you can't select just part of a cluster to save it from deletion.
I'd think deleting the first character of a cluster would make a nice context-menu option. For example, when you right-click on a cluster, the resulting context menu could have an entry like "delete first character". Maybe other such options could be added as well. Murray -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 4:52 PM To: Unicode Subject: User-Hostile Text Editing (was: Unicode String Models) On Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:16:17 +0000 Murray Sargent <[email protected]> wrote: > My latest blog post “Ligatures, Clusters, Combining Marks and > Variation > Sequences<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2012/06/30/ligatures-clusters-combining-marks-and-variation-sequences.aspx>” > discusses some of these complications. Are there any widely available ways of enabling the deleting of the first character in a default grapheme cluster? Having carefully added two or more marks to a base character, I find it extremely irritating to find I have entered the wrong base character and have to type the whole thing again. As one can delete the last character in a cluster, why not the first? It's not as though the default grapheme cluster is usually thought of as a single character. Richard.
