Re: [emacs-bidi] Display routines

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 6 Nov 2001, Matan Ninio wrote:

> say, you want to write an TCL_TK program that has some Hebrew buttons.
> your tcl-tk dose not support bidi, and you really don't need it to, as
> all you want is some static buttons and or texts.
> you edit the source code, put the Hebrew stuff in strings, and they
> print just fine with the right font.
> or you want to write a web page in visual, or whatever.
> (one needs to remember that some of us are forced to work outside of
> emacs from time to time.:)
> 
> > 
> > I think he meant pasting from other applications through the clipboard.
> > And I think this is needed as a special "visual-hebrew-paste" function.
> 
> That's the main idea here.  This dose happen.  In many cases, you don't
> even know if the other application you just marked is logical of
> visual.

Btw, what happens on X today?  I'm guessing that, since bidi is not
really supported, X selections get visual-order strings, is that
right?

What about the small number of widgets that do support bidi: do they
pass text into selections in logical order?

And what happens on MS-Windows--what order is the text in the
clipboard?  I'm guessing it's logical; is it?

> if you can read Hebrew postscript, check this address out
> http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/learning/Info/Ps_Files/lecture2.ps
> but think of orders pairs of letter.  with SOFIOT in hebrew, this should
> work very nicely.

Is something like that possible with Arabic?

> >  > that's it for now, but there probably are many others (Word->displayable
> >  > form??)
> >  
> >  You mean, to read Word .doc files?  What's the bidi-specific aspects
> >  of that?  MS-Word implements UAX#9 (in fact, MS are behind most of
> >  the mess in the bidi algorithm in its present form ;-), so, after
> >  conversion from their proprietary format, what you have is
> >  logical-order text.  Did I miss something?
> 
> yah.  they have some internal representation which may, or may not, be
> Unicode.  I know I'm a tad bit hackerish, but I would want to at least
>  be able to look into such files with Emacs.

There's Antiword, for example.  Using it, I had no problem generating
an iso8859-8 logical-order file from a Word document; you can read
that in Emacs (backwards).  Of course, you lose all the formatting and
the markup.