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

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 06:02:47PM +0200, Shai Berger wrote:

> The editor should be smart enough to understand that it's a hyphen and not a
> minus. I am not too familiar with the Unicode and Bidi standards, 
> but I expect the hebrew character codepages, as opposed to keyboards,
> to have a separate code for hebrew hyphen

I don't think there is such a thing as "hebrew hyphen" (nor even "RTL hyphen")
But, on the other hand, there is "minus/dash" and "soft-hyphen" (and also
typographic "en dash" and "em dash"); only the "minus/dash" is a problem,
as it is not a neutral character like the others but is considered to have
the same properties as numbers (and possibly other mathematical symbols).

So, while I don't think there is a "RTL hyphen"; there are chars that are
direction neutral, that is they will follow the direction of wirtting
(RTL for a Hebrew text).

> (As someone on this list mentioned before, a hebrew hyphen
> should be rendered at the top of the line,

Is that the typographic convention ?
Anyway, the rendition will depend on the font; if the font uses the same
shape for both then you can't visually distinguish them.

> There is a very simple way, I think, to tell whether a typed sign is a
> minus/dash or a hyphen: If the preceding character is a letter, then it's a
> hyphen. Otherwise, it's a minus/dash
... 
> Now, doing it this way will also have problems: For example, if I type
> (I hope this transliteration is clear enough, this is supposed to be like
> 'logical hebrew'):
> 
> kmo-4
> [i.e. kmo<hyphen>4]
> 
> imtending
> 
> kmo -4

That is, I think, the reason why the "-" behaves like it does.

Also, I think it would be a very bad idea to implement a bidi algorithm
different than the unicode one.

So, the best solution imho, would be to handle that at the input level,
instead of the render level: use an hyphen isntead of a "-" in the keyboard
when in Hebrew mode.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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