Re: Editing and formatting characters

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

bstell netscape com (Brian Stell) writes:

> Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> 
> > > Okay, so we are talking about editing where the control characters
> > > are invisible.
> >
> > Yes.
> >
> > > We are also talking about a non novice: ie: someone who understands
> > > what a [RLM] character means and how to insert it.
> >
> > No.
> > The mode wit invisible control chars is primarly for users unaware of all
> > those details; the goal is to allow handling of that in a transparent way,
> > so he has never to know about it (some RLM, LRM, etc can be inserted
> > automatically by a smart input layer, without the user knowing what is
> > going).
> 
> How would the input layer determine the user wanted the [RLM] next to
> the hyphen here?
> 
>   1234-TXET WERBEH
> 
> vs
> 
>   -1234TXET WERBEH

I think the rough consensus on this did not involve inserting a RLM
at all, but simply choosing between HYPHEN and HYPHEN-MINUS depending
on the direction of the keyboard. (Though there were problems with
that and conversion to iso-8859-8.)

The basic situation where I see a need for handling editing in 
invisible-formatting-characters mode is that someone gets a document
that has these characters in it for some reason and fires it up
in their text editor.  

I don't want to default to always displaying the formatting characters
because a) that would be confusing to novices  b) that would be
disruptive to actually reading the text. So, we need a reasonable
way of handling normal editing operations with invisible formatting
characters. 

I believe having invisible cursor positions is confusing and if you
really want to edit the formatting characters in detail, they need to
be visible, so I'd like to find a reasonable solution of automatically
handling the formatting characters when editing the surrounding
characters.

Regards,
                                        Owen