Re: [emacs-bidi] Re: Bidirectional display in GUI sessions

[Gregg Reynolds]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 19:13:09 -0500
> From: Gregg Reynolds <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden

>
> P.S.  Found the NEWS file.  Tried settting bidi-paragraph-direction to
> "right-to-left" but that had not effect either.

This only has effect when characters are reordered.

> Also, opened a file with only Arabic text and it was all LTR.  Ditto
> for Hebrew (this is under emacs -nw).

I have no idea what is going on.  It's as if you were using the wrong
Emacs version.

M-x version yields GNU Emacs 24.0.50.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.8.0, NS apple-appkit-949.54)

I think I'm on the right track now that I know how to activate bidi-display-reordering; thank you.

I foresee major communication problems, though, since we're dealing at least two different RTL languages and two different writing systems. Just describing what's going on is going to be a major pain.  I think a custom font for testing purposes might be in order here.  Something with latinate chars in the RTL codepoints, but with some kind of graphic feature to indicate that they represent RTL glyphs, e.g. an underscrore, vertical stroke along the right border, mirror images, or the like.  I did something like this for using vim Arabic mode, which does RTL but does not reorder numbers or deal with weak directional chars; it worked quite well.  

For Arabic this would have an added benefit, namely keeping glyph rendering (including tashkeel stacking) separate from bidi ordering.  Also, it would allow people with no Arabic to help with testing.

Would this be useful?  If so I can make such a font.

Thanks,

Gregg