Re: [emacs-bidi] mirroring of glyphs

[Ehud Karni]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 19:15:33 +0200, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > > I think the only way to work reasonably well in such cases is to look
> > > at preceding and following characters, and implement some of Ehud's
> > > wisdom to fix UAX#9 lossage.

I'm blushing -:) 

> > The following characters might not exist (yet), and generally inserting
> > bidi characters beyond the users back is a risky business.
> 
> I agree that we should minimize the insertion of formatting codes,
> but there are a few specific cases where UAX#9 does nonsensical
> things, which users won't forgive us.

I think the real solution is to work in some way like the good old
Einstein Writer (always a good reference). When there is some phrase
that the UAX#9 is just doing mishmash of it (like mathematical
expression [see the difference between 1-5 1/5 1*5] or physical
constants like -5.0 C enclosed by Hebrew text) then Emacs should have
"visual mode" that will let user enter each character from left to
right (or right to left in RTL paragraph) disregarding it UNICODE
type (this like LRO ... PDF). The real tricky (and wise) part will
be to convert that string to the best (not defined yet) logical order
so the appearance will be the same but search (done in logical order)
will find the relevant parts (like 23.45 for numbers).

Some times the logical order does make sense (i.e. it is not the
natural way to write) but this behavior will let the user to enter
text like ~50%, <0.1 and so on without exploring the underlying
algorithm.

We need to be comply with UNICODE, but we also need to make life
easier for the users.

Ehud.


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