Re: [emacs-bidi] Column numbering in bidirectional display

[Yair F]

I would stick to logical ordering and have previous/next-line more
accordingly. In the long tem there is no escape - think of region
copying and yanking.
Kepping to strict logical model prevents surprises in the long term -
See Mozilla for a confusing mixed logical/visual implementation.


On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> With most of basic features needed for displaying bidirectional text
> out of my way (the notable omission so far is reordering display
> strings), development now enters the application level, albeit on a
> very basic level for now.
>
> One of the major issues on this level is the semantics of the column
> numbering.  In the unidirectional case, this is trivial: column
> numbers start at zero at the left margin and increase linearly as we
> move to the right.
>
> In the bidirectional case, we have two complications.  First, there
> are right-to-left (R2L) lines made entirely of R2L characters.  They
> are displayed starting at the right margin of the window, like this:
>
>                                      ZYX WVU TSRQ PONMLKJIH GFEDCBA
>
> What should current-column return when point is before A, i.e. at the
> first character of the line in the reading order, which is at the
> right margin of the window on display?
>
> The other complication is mixed L2R and R2L text.  Example of how we
> display a L2R line that includes some R2L characters:
>
>  EDCBA abcde fghij
>
> Here A is the first character of the line in buffer's logical order.
> What should current-column return when point is before A?
>
> A similar example for displaying a R2L line that includes some L2R
> text:
>
>                                                 JIHGF EDCBA abcde
>
> and we have the same dilemma regarding the value of current-column
> when point is before a.
>
> Currently, current-column (and move-to-column, and other primitives in
> indent.c) work in buffer's logical order, disregarding the reordering
> of characters for display.  That is why current-column returns zero
> for all the situations I described above.  It also counts column in
> strict logical order.  For example, here are the column numbers for
> each character of the last example (numbers that need more than one
> digit are written vertically):
>                                                 JIHGF EDCBA abcde
>                                                 11111111987612345
>                                                 76543210
>
> This might surprise at first, and might even look terribly wrong, but
> it turns out that users expect that in bidirectional text.  At least
> MS Word behaves _exactly_ like this, AFAICS.
>
> Moreover, this makes a surprising number of basic Emacs features work
> correctly even though the underlying Lisp code is entirely oblivious
> to bidi reordering.  One example is Dired, when file names include R2L
> characters: I was pleasantly surprised to see that it puts the cursor
> on the correct place within the file name.  Another example is the
> various features that manipulate indentation.
>
> If we decide that columns should be numbered in their screen order,
> from left to right, then we will need:
>
>  . Rewrite primitives in indent.c to be bidi-aware, i.e. advance by
>    calling functions from bidi.c rather than just incrementing
>    character positions.  This would complicate the parts that move
>    backwards, because there's no code in bidi.c that can do that, and
>    it's not trivial to write such code.
>
>  . Fix all the Lisp code that uses these primitives to not assume
>    that column zero is necessarily the first character of the line
>    that follows a newline.
>
> Admittedly, there are some features which need to be fixed even if we
> keep the current semantics of column numbering.  C-e (just fixed 2
> days ago) is one example.  But I think the number of such features is
> much smaller than if we number columns in visual screen order.
>
> So on balance, I think we should keep the current semantics of the
> line numbering, whereby columns are numbered in strict logical order.
>
> If we decide to go that way, we will need to provide primitives or
> subroutines to get to the visually first and last characters of a
> visual line.  That's because some features need that; see the thread
> Re: Hl-line and visual-line for one example.  beginning-of-visual-line
> and end-of-visual-line sound like a good starting point.
>
> Comments are welcome.
>
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