bug#9219: 24.0.50; bidi switches to R-to-L when I don't want it to

[Florian Beck]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Florian Beck <abstraktion@t-online.de>
>> Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:06:36 +0200
>> 
>> Occasinally I use א (x5d0) at the beginning of a paragraph (as a marker
>> for some quite but not completly unrelated thought, cf. Agamben).
>> 
>> This makes emacs display the buffer aligned to the right (correctly, as
>> for the docstring of `bidi-paragraph-direction'), which is not what I want.
>
> What _do_ you want?

As in a left-to-right paragraph. A more common example would be someone
writing an english article and starting not only a sentence but a
paragraph with a hebrew (or arabic or thaana) term. Rare? Sure, but
perfectly reasonably.

>> There are various workarounds (setting above variable, disabling bidi
>> reordering, using ℵ (ALEF SYMBOL x2135) or giving up that marking
>> scheme)
>
> There's one other method: Precede the א with a special character LRM
> (C-x 8 RET LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK RET).  This will make the paragraph
> left-to-right, but only that one paragraph.  It's in the manual.  Does
> this do what you want, by any chance?

This works, thanks.

BTW, I'm reporting my experience with running bidi enabled emacs on my
text files. I found the section in the manual easily enough. But if I
wouldn't read emacs-devel, I'd have no idea what was going on.


>
>> but there should be a way to indicate the direction of a specific
>> paragraph, shouldn't there?
>
> If by "indicate" you mean tell Emacs that this single paragraph has a
> certain direction, then using LRM resp RLM is that way.

Yes. But there is one more thing: Let A be a alef, M the marker and | the 
cursor.

Say I have a paragraph displayed as

                   |A blah blah

Now I insert the left-to-right mark. This results in:

AM blah blah

which seems … weird. The marker is not part of the word, so it should be
to the left in l-to-r paragraphs.

-- 
Florian Beck