features for WP

["Amir E. Aharoni" <amir_e_a netvision net il>]

Character / internationaliztion

copy all Word's capabilities plus: shadows, outline, maybe some more
decorations. I've never used a Mac, but i heard it has much more builtin
typeface modification capabilities than Windows.

Direction is VERY, VERY important for internationalization (as i
mentioned in some of my previous i'm a Hebrew speaker and right to left
writing is a mess on computers).

"Dagesh" an Israeli word processor for Windows had excellent
multilanguage support, much better than the one in Word Hebrew Edition.
Microsoft rely on Windows 95 built in multi language support, and it's
far from perfect - there's no Arabic support unless it is an Arabic
version of Windows and the same for Hebrew. Unfortunately, MS, as usual,
won in a very unfair competition and that wonderful WP most probably
won't have new versions.

Now, Dagesh had its own multilanguage mechanism: along with all the
usual character properties (typeface, size, etc.) it had "language" and
"direction" fields.

"Language" is the name of the language: EnglishUS, EnglishUK, Hebrew,
Arabic (traditional), Arabic (simplified), Russian, Bulgarian (though
it's the same alphabet as Russian), Ukrainian, Hungarian etc etc etc
(there also was a very neat drop down box with language names and
flags). That was used for spell checking and selecting default
direction.

"Direction" is the direction of the character. It had three possible
settings: "Automatic", "Right to left", "Left to right".

"Automatic":

is the default and it means: determine the proper direction according to
the language setting. e. g.: For English it will be always left-to-right
(i see no reason for RTL in English except embedding Hebrew sections,
but for those "Hebrew" language should be applied anyway). For Hebrew
however it's very complicated: usual text must be RTL, but embedded
numbers, mathematical expressions and Latin-characters words must be
LTR. Personally, i've never seen that ANY computer program has ever
implemented this automatic direction setting perfectly - MS-Office is
the worst, some Israeli WP's are a little better.

"Right to left", "Left to right":

Force RTL or LTR, no matter what is the language or whether those are
numbers or whatever.

W3C offers similar implementation in HTML4, but it says that, quote:

"User agents must not use the lang attribute to determine text
directionality."

Thus, rtl and ltr should be always set manually. However, as it seems to
me, automatic direction setting should be present and it should be
default.

Unfortunately i can't really see it working, 'cause Netscape doesn't
support that feature of HTML4; Internet Explorer does support it, but i
won't install it on my machine unless there's a gun pointing at me.
Besides, most Hebrew websites don't use HTML4 bidi features yet anyway,
they prefer some old crufty way - it involves installing some special
fonts that are supposed to work with Netscape, but i don't want to do
that either.

Thanks for reading this far :)

-- 
Amir Elisha' Aharoni, the Original Israelite
mailto:amir_e_a@netvision.net.il icq:3816214

now playing: 

This may seem a bit weird,
but that's okay, because it is weird.
(Larry Wall, official Perl documentation)