Re: improving bidi documents display

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> Cc: Michael Welsh Duggan <address@hidden>,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  
> address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:10:07 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> >> Another idea would be to allow a text property to override the character
> >> type.
> >
> > Overlay, not text property.  The latter modifies the buffer, which is
> > not what you want in this case.
> 
> Wouldn't this sort of property potentially affect lots of text in the
> buffer?

Not necessarily.  For example, in a buffer with TeX stuff, the only
portions of text that would need such an overlay are the TeX
directives (which should always be rendered L2R).

> Overlays are not a good choice for such a thing, and the
> overlay interface is generally worse for things which really are text
> properties, which these seem to be...
> 
> Text-properties could be used `with-silent-modifications' or some-such
> to avoid buffer modification, as is usually done with fortification.

Text properties have advantages, and they also have disadvantages.

Anyway, there's no design yet that was already decided upon for how to
support these features.  When that design decision is made, whoever
makes it will have to consider this issue, of course.