RE: Concerning the hyphen confusion in BiDi (was: Re: Bidirectional Bugs in Hebrew)

[Jonathan Rosenne <rosenne qsm co il>]

It is perfectly valid for an editor to do this and any other transformations
the author deems useful.

The assumption (1)==(2) is for plain text editors, such as notepad.

Jony

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ivrix-discuss ivrix org il
> [mailto:owner-ivrix-discuss ivrix org il]On Behalf Of Omer Zak
> Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2000 11:10 PM
> To: Ivrix Discussions
> Cc: Pango Mailing list
> Subject: Concerning the hyphen confusion in BiDi (was: Re:
> Bidirectional Bugs in Hebrew)
>
>
> I would like to offer a fresh point of view on the problem of hyphen/minus
> sign between Hebrew letter and the number following it.
>
> Conceptually, there are three text orderings:
> 1. The sequence of characters, as they are typed by an user on a text
>    editor.
> 2. The sequence of characters, as stored in a file in "Logical Hebrew
>    order".
> 3. The sequence of characters, as displayed visually - in "Visual Hebrew
>    order".
>
> In all discussions so far, we made the implicit assumption that (1)==(2).
> Then we used the Unicode BiDi algorithm to convert from (1),(2) into (3)
> and cursed why the user has to suffer the agony of typing first an Hebrew
> letter, then a number and only then the separating hyphen if he wants to
> see letter-hyphen-number sequence.
>
> I believe that it is OK to store such a sequence as letter-number-hyphen
> in a Logical Hebrew ordered text file.  Such a sequence would be displayed
> (by Pango and other applications using the BiDi algorithms) as
> letter-hyphen-number (from right to left).
>
> !!! However, it does not follow from the above that the user must type !!!
> !!! the sequence in the same order as in the file.                     !!!
>
> So, I am hereby proposing that editors, which support BiDi text editing,
> adopt the following rule:
>
> All typed-in text will be saved into text file in the same order it was
> typed in (unless modified by insertions/deletions/cursor movements, of
> course) EXCEPT that:
> In Hebrew keyboard mode, a sequence of Hebrew letter followed by hyphen
> followed by digit shall cause the following:
>
>   The text, as stored into the file, will be in order:  Hebrew letter
>   followed by digit followed by hyphen.  Then the cursor will be moved one
>   position backwards, to allow insertion of additional digits before the
>   hyphen.  Then, any inserted non-digit character shall cause the cursor
>   to be moved after the hyphen, and then insert the non-digit character
>   there.
>
> If an user wants to override the above behavior (e.g. to enter negative
> numbers), he should set the keyboard mode to Latin before typing the
> hyphen, and back to Hebrew after finishing to type the number.
>
> DISCLAIMER:  I didn't actually test the above suggestion, so it may yet
>              have some flaws.  Please review it.
>              I plan to test the suggestion in a BiDi text editor developed
>              by me within few days - after you suggest enough test cases
>              to prove that there are no flaws in my suggestion.
>
>                                              --- Omer
> WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  see at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
>
> ----
> Ivrix-discuss list. See http://ivrix.org.il.
> To unsubscribe, please send mail to majordomo ivrix org il with only the
> following line in the message body (NOT SUBJECT!): unsubscribe
> ivrix-discuss
>