Re: [emacs-bidi] status? news?

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I don't think our desires have any influence on what behemoths like 
> Microsoft do in their implementations, no matter how hard do we push.  
> And I surely do NOT want Emacs to work like Word does when I edit bidi 
> text, because Word gets it wrong in too many important cases, at least in 
> Hebrew.

I do not want that either. The problems of Word with Arabic script should
be much more, they have also @#$%ed the joining behaviour.

But in the long run we need portablity, don't we? And I believe that we
have some levers to push now. I have even managed to make contact with
the head of Windows i18n at Microsoft, and he's an Iranian by birth.

> Whoever wants the text to be displayed correctly will use the Unicode 
> control characters judiciously, because that's the only way to make sure 
> the text displays as the writer meant it.

That has it's own problems you know. Few applications support expliciit
bidi marks, and it seems many programs will not ever support them, because
of their behaviour that affects next text lines. Using them makes it less
portable, I think.

> Also, with the ridculously small number of bidi-compliant applications 
> that are meant for general-purpose text editing, I don't see the 
> compliance issue to be an important one any time soon.  Word, for 
> example, is not an issue here, because it doesn't produce plain text 
> files.

Word and Internet Explorer use the same engine for bidi reordering. And
we're not talking only about plain text. HTML also relies on Unicode bidi.
We want the user to be able the see the text in her Internet Explorer
exactly in the same order you see it in your Emacs. I am trying my best to
push Microsoft into proper bidi /display/ in their programs (although I
agree that it's really impossible).

> That complicates things tremendously.
> 
> Like I said, the disadvantages of visual order far outweigh its 
> advantages.  I don't think we need to get into this argument again.

I agree. It only seems easier to implement to me. But I'm possibly only
a talker in emacs-bidi, not a developer.

--roozbeh