Re: [emacs-bidi] Re: [emacs-bidi]status? news?

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> "it is a car!" is a left-to-right text, so the exclam should be displayed 
> to the right of `r', even though it is surrounded by R2L characters.

You will simply need to insert an LRM after the exclamation mark to get it
right. You will know that the exclamation mark should be considered LTR
when the user pressess it in Latin keyboard mode, and you will know that
it will be wrongly displayed, so you will insert the mark (or you will
use embedding marks).

> > Is the first sequence the
> > sequence of keys the user presses on the keyboard or the sequence of
> > bytes that was stored in the file?
> 
> Both (the logical order is, by definition, the order in which the user 
> types).  This example is taken directly from the Freebidi home page, and I 
> understand that the left side is the text in logical order, whereas the 
> right part is the visual order.  I'm saying that the position of the 
> exclam in the visual order is wrong, IMHO.

The definition is short-minded, I think. I define the logical order as the
order of characters in the file (I know that's not exact ;)). The user
should be able to customize the editor behaviour, she may need different
behaviour from the default, the famous example being the section numbers.
But her file should display the same everywhere. The Unicode algorithm
doesn't make sense for many Persian applications also, more than its
problems with Hebrew or Arabic, because they didn't know the problems of
Persian when designing it.

My idea of easy (for user) bidi editing, is keeping some more information
with the text, the embedding level for example. And the editor should
really be intelligent and customizable about what the user types, using
its own bidi. It need to be aware of "Unicode Bidi" only when reading or
writing to a file, or gets a text pasted from another application. I can
explain more regarding this, if needed.

But I don't know if that's possible with Emacs.

--roozbeh