Re: [emacs-bidi] Callbacks?

[Martin Duerst]

Hello Greg,

At 01:59 05/11/29, Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>Martin Duerst wrote:
>...
>> At the last Internationalization and Unicode Conference,
>> I presented a paper that looked at the problems of displaying
>> (X)HTML or XML with bidi text.
>> (http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2005/pub/IUC28-bidi/IUC28.html,
>> see also http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2005/pub/IUC28-bidi/
>> for more pointers)
>>
>
>An implementation technique I'd like to see is to simply use background 
color to indicate which weakly-directional characters in a bidi string have 
been reordered by the algorithm.

This seems like an useful idea to start with. But how exactly would
you define "weakly-directional characters that have been reordered"?
At first sight, reordering is not a property of individual characters.

[For the first stage of our work, we also did a lot of coloring,
down to the individual character.]

>That way if I see e.g. " with the "reordered-background-color" I
>can either do the rearrangement in my head

Great if that works for you. But I don't think that would work
for a large number of people, and we are trying to do better
than that.

>or add a direction override.

Adding marks, embeddings, or overrides directly to the source is
the first idea one gets when looking at the weird ways in which
things such as HTML or XML source get reordered by the bidi
algorithm. But the problem is that you can't add these things
to the source, because they
a) ay end up in places where they make the source illegal
   (e.g. inside a tag)
b) may affect not only how the source is displayed, but
   also how the content is displayed e.g. in a browser.
   In some cases, the desired change is the same, and then
   everything is okay, but in other cases, you may mess up
   the final display when trying to fix the source.

Regards,   Martin.