Re: [emacs-bidi] status? news?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> > "it is a car!" is a left-to-right text, so the exclam should be displayed 
> > to the right of `r', even though it is surrounded by R2L characters.
> 
> You will simply need to insert an LRM after the exclamation mark to get it
> right.

I don't think it is reasonable to request that the user inserts an LRM in 
such simple cases.

> > > Is the first sequence the
> > > sequence of keys the user presses on the keyboard or the sequence of
> > > bytes that was stored in the file?
> > 
> > Both (the logical order is, by definition, the order in which the user 
> > types).
>
> The definition is short-minded, I think. I define the logical order as the
> order of characters in the file (I know that's not exact ;)).

I believe ``logical order'' is defined (not by me) as the order in which 
characters are typed or read.

> The Unicode algorithm
> doesn't make sense for many Persian applications also, more than its
> problems with Hebrew or Arabic, because they didn't know the problems of
> Persian when designing it.

I won't be surprised if the Unicode algorithm didn't know anything beyond 
what Microsoft considered to be useful for them at the time ;-)

> My idea of easy (for user) bidi editing, is keeping some more information
> with the text, the embedding level for example.

It is possible that this will be needed in more complicated cases.  But 
I'd expect the simple case of mixing L2R and R2L text to not require such 
additional information, because implicit embedding can be easily deduced 
from the characters you find in the buffer.

> And the editor should
> really be intelligent and customizable about what the user types, using
> its own bidi.

This goes without saying.  However, I'm currently concerned with the 
default behavior being smart enough to be useful, and not by how to make 
that customizable, because I think the default behavior should be good 
enough for the majority of users and uses.  (The default can be language- 
and locale-dependent, of course.)

> It need to be aware of "Unicode Bidi" only when reading or
> writing to a file, or gets a text pasted from another application.

If the text is kept in logical order in the buffer, the display needs to 
know about this as well.

> But I don't know if that's possible with Emacs.

What is the aspect that you think might not be possible with Emacs?