Re: [emacs-bidi] Suboptimal display-reordering in minibuffer

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:26:56 +0900
> From: "Martin J. Dürst" <address@hidden>
> CC: Amit Aronovitch <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> > Emacs does not yet handle HTML, XML, and other similar markup formats
> > with bidi text.  Before we add such support, we need to design it.
> > UAX#9 is of no help here; we need to come up with our own solution,
> > preferably one that is based on existing Emacs features.  This is a
> > significant job, so I put it aside for now.
> 
> I think I have mentioned this before, but we have been doing some work 
> in the area of rendering HTML/XML source with bidi text. Please see
> http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2008/pub/IUC32-bidi/ and the links from 
> there. (it still has quite a few problems, mostly related to editing Web 
> pages and JavaScript,...)
> 
> It also looks like we might get around to work on transposing our 
> solutions to Emacs this year. It's too early to promise anything, but 
> we'll try our best. And we will certainly be glad to get help and advice 
> from this list.

Thanks.  You did mention this before, and I've read those pages.

However, it is difficult to judge their applicability to Emacs,
because virtually nothing is said regarding the implementation, except
that it "uses overlays".

So it would be good to discuss your suggested solution for Emacs, to
make sure that it fits.  Please note that the "emacs-bidi" you used
for your work is radically different in the way it implements bidi
reordering from what was eventually designed and implemented in the
current Emacs development sources.  So what worked with "emacs-bidi"
will not necessarily work well with the current mainline code.

> The problem of properly (or let's say decently or reasonably) displaying 
> (e.g. C) source code with bidi characters is in my estimation quite a 
> bit simpler than the problem for HTML or XML.

So maybe we should start with a simpler problem ;-)

The important thing is to establish whether we need some
infrastructure in Emacs that is currently missing, because that would
need to be coded first, before any user-visible progress can be made.