Re: Valid UTF-8 text mangled up in GtkLabel

[Gaurav Jain <gaurav anywhere gmail com>]

Hello Behdad,

Thanks for your quick response.  I did understand what you stated
w.r.t. to the arabic text coming on the right, but I didn't quite
understand how the brackets that are coming are "correct" even for
right-to-left direction.

I mean, it's not the "direction" of the brackets, it's the fact that
the wrong brackets are surrounding the text.  Why is it that, for
example, the round bracket, which was surrounding my name earlier, it
now at the beginning of the text, at one end of my email address, and
instead the angle bracket has taken it's original position?

Are you sure that the order of brackets is indeed correct for
right-to-left languages?  Kindly confirm (would be useful if you could
point me to some documentation on this bracket behavior for
right-to-left languages).

Thanks a lot!
Gaurav

On 8/5/05, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Gaurav Jain wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm trying to set the text in a GtkLabel to a UTF-8 string, which
> > contains some arabic characters first, followed by my email address in
> > angle brackets, followed by my name in round brackets.  For e.g., a
> > sample value is:
> >
> > X <gaurav somewhere com> (Gaurav Jain)
> >
> > In the above, 'X' represents a valid sequence of arabic UTF-8
> > characters.  The problem that I see is that when I run this program
> > (appended to this mail), the output shown is something like this:
> >
> > (gaurav somewhere com> (Gaurav Jain> X
> >
> > Note that the angle and round brackets are all messed up, and that
> > order of arabic and ascii words is also wrong.
>
> Apparently our milages do vary ;).
>
>
> > Does anyone know WHY this is happening?
>
> Yes, because Arabic is written from right to left, unlike Latin.
> And this behavior is part of the Unicode standard.
>
> > Just for information, I'm using GTK 2.4.14.  Also,
> > I was surprised to discover that this works fine with an older version
> > of GTK (2.0.9).
>
> Right.  Because /bidi/ was not implemented completely in that
> version.  This specific part of bidi that is causing problems for
> you is called automatic paragraph direction.
>
> > Does something special need to be done so I can get
> > it to work with GTK >= 2.4?
>
> It /is/ working.  If you like to get the behavior similar to the
> old one, you need ot insert a U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK character
> at the beginning of the buffer.
>
>
> > Thanks,
> > Gaurav
>
> --behdad
> http://behdad.org/