[emacs-bidi] Re: RTL support

[Gregg Reynolds]

Benjamin Riefenstahl wrote:
> Hi Gregg,

Howdy Benny,

Thanks much for taking the time for a thoughtful reply.  Since this is, 
after all, the emacs-bidi developer list, I'll make a couple of short 
remarks and respond off list.

First is that I really should be talking about "orientation 
independence" and not just LTR/RTL.  We also need top-to-bottom RTL 
(CJK) and top-to-bottom LTR (Mongolian).  Ideally application code for 
drawing would be the same for each.
...
> Hm.  In your opinion, native Arab speakers who only work in their own
> language are how much of the whole user base for Arabic?  50%?  70%?
> 90%?

No idea.  Well, let's face it, emacs is a programming tool first and 
foremost, and it would be pretty hard to program without knowing a bit 
of English.  ;)  But in general, I suspect strongly that technical 
people routinely overestimate the *need* (not the desire) of non-LTR 
people to use Western languages in their texts.  Google around a bit for 
Arabic-language online newspapers - I almost never see anything but 
Arabic script in the texts.  English/French tends to show up in only two 
places: where the SW vendor puts it at the bottom of the page, or in 
advertising images.  (Or course there are exceptions.)

> As far as I have seen (and you have probably more experience),
> newspapers and magazines sometimes do and sometimes don't.

T'is true.  But the point is they can still publish without it.

> advertisements seem to be more likely to use at least their brand
> names in Latin script.  And those advertisements targeting the wealthy
> probably use English marketing phrases, as they do over here in
> Germany, right?

Mmm, not usually marketing phrases, I think, mostly company and product 
names, usually.  I think English is far more widely used in Germany and 
Europe generally than in the Arab world.

> than with others, as this example shows.  And even here we actually
> have emacs-bidi now.

Well ok then!  Practical stuff!  (Oh, yeah, point 3:  advocating 
mono-directional RTL support != anti-bidi.)  How do we get it into the 
main branch?  Is it simply a matter of thorough testing?  Do we need 
some kind of test harness, lots of test cases?  I would be more than 
happy to contribute in any way needed.

Will the bidi branch work on MSWindows?  I'm afraid the vast majority of 
RTL people (at least in the Arab world) use Windows, so we would 
probably need Windows binaries to recruit testers.  For the *nixy stuff, 
I think we could twist some arms at arabeyes.org to do testing stuff.

What about code review?  Do you need Arabic speakers to take look?  Add 
unit tests, etc.?

-gregg