preview panel in OpenType Designer

[בן של מלך]

A. When you press the up and down arrows on the keyboard while typing words into Preview, all the words I wrote are lost and cannot be recovered, think that you have important cases that you are checking and typing them in Preview to arrange them later, and you accidentally clicked the up arrow, out of habit that "up" takes you to the beginning paragraph, and then you find out that all the cases you found have been deleted, it takes a lot of time.
Maybe this is really the place to ask for an option to add "Notes" in the OpenType Designer panel.
B. When you type marks in Hebrew, there are letters that have more than one mark, you can write more than 5 marks for one glyph (!) (in the picture you see a word with 6 marks).
As soon as you move from mark to mark by pressing the right and left arrows, the writing marker moves from letter to letter and not from mark to mark, what happens is that if I have two marks after Base, and I want to replace the first mark, I first have to delete the second mark and then the The first, because pressing delete will delete the entire letter with all its marks, and pressing backspace will only delete the last mark.
There are marks that are difficult to write, due to the large number of them you have to pull them out of a character map and only then write, in such a situation if I want to delete the mark in front of it, I have no way, because it is impossible to grab the mark and replace it as I wrote, that the mouse cursor takes up the entire base, delete The base with a delete button is also not possible, it will delete all the marks that this base has, and if I delete in order with Backface I will not be able to restore the last mark that I do need.
The same problem if I want to add a mark between two marks, or between the base and an existing mark that I must first delete.
The question is if it can be fixed?
Hope I was clear enough...

[Erwin Denissen]

It is a common Windows edit control, so there is nothing we can do about this.

In such situation we simple disable the shaping engine along with all features, then select the line of glyph names at the bottom of the preview panel, and use that as input.

[בן של מלך]

I will give you an example.
There is the letter W here with marks, for the purpose of the example I used the digits (2) defined as marks.

W.png (4.09 KiB) Viewed 5667 times

In that case, if I suddenly want to insert the number 1 between the letter W and the number 2, or just like that between the numbers 2 - I can, because in the text line I have room to grab a glyph.

W2.png (5.21 KiB) Viewed 5667 times

But, if I didn't use numerals (which appear as single characters in the text line), but normal marks, and in this example I underlined a Hebrew letter with a mark of one point, and a mark of two points, if between the marks of the one point I want to add a mark of two points, I must first remove the one point marks and then add two point marks!

א חיריק.png (9.68 KiB) Viewed 5667 times

In InDesign, for example, I can grab only the glyph of the mark and remove only that!
In the picture there are two marks, one lying and one standing, and I can only grab the lying mark (the first) and remove it.

ח.png (4.5 KiB) Viewed 5667 times

The importance of this is mainly when there are marks that cannot be written with a keyboard, because they are relatively rare, and what needs to be done is to delete them, then freak out about where I get them back, or open InDesign or Word and write the desired characters.
What I asked to upgrade is, A, to be able to press the up arrow and reach the beginning of the paragraph (let's say, with the scroll wheel to move between pre-defined texts), and the down arrow to reach the end of the paragraph (there is another advantage in this, that when checking long texts, if I want to reach the end of the text, that then you can easily reach the end).
B. What I also wanted, and it's more important, is to be able to move between different marks by pressing the left and right arrows, so that you can delete the first mark without removing the other marks.

Am I clearer now?

[Erwin Denissen]

I totally understand, but the control simply doesn't support it.

The text tool within a glyph panel might be better for this purpose. Have you tried it?

[בן של מלך]

I don't know how complex it will be to program such a thing, but this is the default settings that are in every software, up arrow to the beginning of the paragraph, down arrow to the end of the paragraph, right and left arrows, allow you to move between letters or between marks, delete deletes the next letter (not including the marks !), and backspace deletes the next letter or mark.
How complex is it for you?

[Erwin Denissen]

I have tried to implement it in the Text Tool, but it has other limitations. Does it work for you?

[בן של מלך]

I didn't understand what the text tool was.
I thought you meant that tool that while editing a glyph you can type, but then I discovered something strange.
I pressed Alt P on my keyboard, (it should type a glyph called patah-hebr - it's: ַ ), and this is what happened:

Recording 2023-09-28 at 3.21.10 PM.gif (681.95 KiB) Viewed 5625 times

I made a copy for the strange glyphs that were created, and this is what was copied.
/?א/?א/?ג/?
The funny thing is, I don't have any glyph in this color...

Anyway, which text tool did you mean?

[Erwin Denissen]

Yes, I mean that tool.

[בן של מלך]

So check out what's going on there.