Re: [emacs-bidi] status? news?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> > There are several implementations of the Unicode algorithm, and they all 
> > differ in some hard cases.  So the goal of gettin the text displayed the 
> > same everywhere seems to be impossible to achieve anyway.  Given this, I 
> > don't see any disaster in having another slightly different implementation,
> > provided that we think it is a better one.  (And it really isn't so hard
> > to come up with a better implementation, believe me.)
> 
> It's possible to achieve. I believe that the implementations will converge
> to Unicode compliance.

Or the other way around.

> We really need the portablity of text, and I'm sure
> the bidi writers will start pushing the implementors to support exact
> display of bidi texts.

I don't think our desires have any influence on what behemoths like 
Microsoft do in their implementations, no matter how hard do we push.  
And I surely do NOT want Emacs to work like Word does when I edit bidi 
text, because Word gets it wrong in too many important cases, at least in 
Hebrew.

Whoever wants the text to be displayed correctly will use the Unicode 
control characters judiciously, because that's the only way to make sure 
the text displays as the writer meant it.

Also, with the ridculously small number of bidi-compliant applications 
that are meant for general-purpose text editing, I don't see the 
compliance issue to be an important one any time soon.  Word, for 
example, is not an issue here, because it doesn't produce plain text 
files.

Again, please remember that strict UTR9 compliance should be a user 
option in any case.  So those who need it, will have it.

> > Not necessarily.  I was talking about cutting and pasting within Emacs, 
> > where the OS isn't involved at all.
> 
> In that case, it can find the directionality. It has the string in the
> other buffer, and can tell it from the resolved level (in Unicode bidi
> terms) of the character.

That complicates things tremendously.

Like I said, the disadvantages of visual order far outweigh its 
advantages.  I don't think we need to get into this argument again.