Re: Thai/Devanagari in GNOME Terminal

[Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir technion ac il>]

On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Robert Brady wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Chookij Vanatham wrote:
> 
> > Since I'm native Thai person, I can share some information about how
> > Thai script works in Terminal emulator.
> 
> Have you tried the Thai support in xterm? As far as I know it's
> acceptable, but we'd like more feedback...
> 
> > In term of, bidrectional script like arabic/hebrew, I think we should
> > check how their bahaviors would be first. May be someone from native
> > language can give us more info like I did for Thai.
> 
> Again, this is apparantley working fine in xterm without recourse to
> pango. (At least our native Persian speaker is happy, barring a few minor 
> bugs)

Adding bidirectional support at the level of the xterm has some inherent
difficulties, as I understand it. 

>From my (not very long) exprience with working on terminal emulation from
Windows with bidirectional Hebrew support, and similar programs, it will
probably can never be perfect. For instance, in many cases there is no
good way to determain the base directionality of a piece of text.

Furthermore, the application running in the xterm may have a real
bidirectional support. Therefore the terminal emulation should make it
easy for the user to disable the bidirectional support. They may be less
important for other proggrams, but a terminal emulation basically displays
the output of other programs, and not much more.

(On Hebrew windows I currently use for that purpose a special font that
has Hebrew glyphs, but uses the latin1 script. I don't know exactly if and
how such things are avaible with unicode)

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir technion ac il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir