Re: Unicode text Direction Detection

[Gaurav Jain <gaurav anywhere gmail com>]

Thanks Behdad.  

On 8/17/05, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Gaurav Jain wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a Unicode text, and I need to detect its direction by some BiDi
> > algorithm (i.e., whether it is Left-to-right or Right-to-left).  For
> > example, I need to look for the first "strong" directional character
> > in the text, and find out its direction.  Is there a way I can do that
> > using some GTK/GLib APIs?  Something, perhaps, on the line of the
> > Windows API GetStringTypeW() perhaps?
> >
> > Any help in this regard would be appreciated!
>
> Hello,
>
> We have one of the best bidi direction handling in GNOME, but for
> the purpose of your application, we don't have the needed API
> defined I'm afraid.  The logic is implemented in FriBidi.  It
> does have the API to give you back the paragraph direction, but
> it analyzes the test at the same time too.  In future versions of
> FriBidi it would have the exact API to just do what you're asking
> for.
I found the pango API called pango_unichar_direction() which I can
probably use to determine if a given unicode character is RTL or LTR. 
So from what I understand, I will probably need to write a small
implementation of myself until GTK comes up with the API.

> In GNOME though, Pango uses an internal copy of FriBidi, which
> means, you don't have access to that facility.  And Pango doesn't
> export what you need AFAIK.  Then there's the text widget in Gtk+
> too, don't know whether it exports the direction of individual
> paragraph.  I really doubt it does.
>
> Please file a bug report with the exact feature you want (is it
> just a paragraph of text you have, or text in a text widget,
> etc), we will look at the API addition.
OK, I will do that.
> > Thanks,
> > Gaurav
>
> --behdad
> http://behdad.org/
gaurav