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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 07:38:45 -0500
> From: Gregg Reynolds <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> 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.

You can always send a screenshot.

And, as I said in my previous mail, it would be better to discuss this
on emacs-devel, where more people would help us overcome the
difficulties (which I agree are real).

> 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.

I would suggest to first try to see how can we get along without such
a significant investment.  I believe that with screenshots accompanied
with proper explanations, and with developers we have on emacs-devel
that use OSX, we will be able to do just fine.

If that doesn't work well enough, then a special font is the way to
go.

Btw, you should be able to achieve almost the same result using the
Emacs display table feature, whereby any character can be made to
display as any other character or a string.  I used that quite a lot
while working on the bidi display on a TTY, because the telnet client
I used (PuTTY) insisted on using its own reordering behind my back.

Thanks.