Re: [emacs-bidi] Where do I start?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Alex Schroeder wrote:

> Assume you are the project manager.  :)

Ah, that... (putting on my managerial cap).

Okay, how's this sound: how about writing a visual-to-logical
converter?

Some preliminary thoughts:

  - Ideally, the code will accept a paragraph of text (which can span
    several lines), and produce a reordered paragraph.  But in
    practice, it's possible that only a small part of the text is
    passed (think about reading output of an async subprocess).  I
    don't know what to do about this case; perhaps nothing for now.

  - The paragraph could be left-justified (a mostly left-to-right text
    with some right-to-left characters embedded), or right-justified.
    In the latter case, you need to remove any padding blanks on the
    left, as part of the conversion.

  - It would be nice if the code included detection of visual-order
    bidi text, but it's not imperative.

  - It would be nice if converting from logical to visual and then
    back would be as close to the original as possible.  I think you
    should be able to reproduce the original exactly if it contains no
    explicit formatting codes; otherwise, you can't.

IIRC, Ehud's hebeng.el has a function for something like that, so
perhaps most (or even all) of the job is already done.  But that's
part of the research.

Oh, and I need this by today's noon, otherwise start typing your
resume' ;-)  I'm your manager, remember?

> > I'm not sure what would be the purpose of reading the code.  From my
> > point of view, it would be nice, of course, if someone else eyeballed
> > the code and reported any blunders that are still there, but is that
> > really an efficient use of the few weeks you have?
> 
> Who knows?  All I know is that today, I didn't do anything.

Of course, you did: you participated in an important discussion about
your project.  (Being on the management, I cannot allow anyone to say
people I manage waste their time, can I?)