Re: [emacs-bidi] status? news?

[Yotam Medini]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 05:08:09PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Yotam Medini wrote:
> 
> > I would love to have a working Emacs with bidi-support even without a
> > 'smart' automatic direction.  While typing R2L text, having to
> > explicitly ask Emacs to switch to L2R for numbers or English names may
> > be annoying, but I still prefer this to 'gvim'. This is assuming the
> > files are well written and will be successfully read, now and also in
> > future and smarter bidi-Emacs versions.
> 
> This doesn't help, unfortunately.  Forcing the user to explicitly switch 
> directions doesn't make the bidi support easier, because it still needs 
> to perform logical to visual order conversion for display.  Assuming you 
> still want the buffer to be stored in logical order, that is.

Yes, I do want logical.

> The main difficulty in logical to visual conversion is not the decision 
> which character should be rendered right to left and which the other way 
> around: this is relatively easy.  The problem is how to make this 
> reordering part of the Emacs display engine.

So let's postpone the delicate questions such as how to 
automatically handle exclamation marks to a later release.
Am I missing something again(?).

I will try to look at Emacs display engine code.
(dispnew.[ch], dispextern.h, xdisp.c etc) and see how hard
it is for me to volunteer.
 
> If you are willing to give up the logical order in the buffer, you will 
> have a useless Hebrew support, because most bidi software out there wants 
> text in logical order.
> 
> In any case, if storing text in visual order is an option for you, you 
> can have it today: Ehud Karni wrote (a lot of time ago) a Hebrew mode, 
> where each character is pushed or inserted according to its directional 
> attributes and surrounding characters.  Ehud's package is Lisp-level 
> only, and can be made to work with any version of Emacs.  Just mail Ehud 
> and ask him.

I will wait for your(?) future engine, and send you a bottle of
champagne when it will be part of an official Emacs release.

-- 
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