Re: Bidirectional Bugs in hebrew

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 12:59:21PM -0700, Chookij Vanatham wrote:
 
> ] > ] And if we use soft hyphen (0xad, available in iso-8859-6 (Arabic),
> ] >
> ] > I haven't tried this but I think, you should get the same result because
> ] > "soft hyphen" would not be the R type like hebrew alphabet.
> ] 
> ] but shouldn't a neutral char inherit the "default" direction (in this case
> ] being RTL if you write in Hebrew.
> I think that a neutral char should inherit the default direction but
> "minus sign" is the week type.

But I talked about "soft hyphen" not "minus sign" :)

> ] Of course; but that isn't very userfriendly.
> I do agree too but I guess that there is still some need that only,
> RLO,RLE,LRO,LRE,PDF would be able to help. I don't have these experence on
> hand but will try to use more arabic/hebrew...

The two cases I immediately see are: mixing text and equations (math stuff
is written left to right; and math stuff really needs to be correctly
displayed); and when you start a line with a word in a LTR script; eg:

chanae:~$ echo xxx IS THE NAME GIVEN TO BLABLABLA. | fribidi
xxx ALBALBALB OT NEVIG EMAN EHT SI.

of course you wanted something like:

chanae:~$ echo Axxx IS THE NAME GIVEN TO BLABLABLA. | fribidi
.ALBALBALB OT NEVIG EMAN EHT SI xxxA

(with first "A" being the RTL forcing mark)

> ] A real life example: "8-bit" in Hebrew: "8-á" gives "á8-" which is wrong;
> ] and "8­á" gives the right "á­8".
> ] When people are typing text they want the hyphen to follow the direction
> ] of writting; so having the kbd send a soft hyphen seems a good solution.
> ] What do you think about that ?
> For this context, I would like to have "hyphen" followed the text (to the
> right) then, because "soft-hyphen" it works without using LRO/LRE/RLO/RLE/PDF,
> then, I would prefer to use "soft-hypen" but how to input it is another point.
> Either mapping it like this, I'm fine too. They might be other way to input
> soft-hyphen as well.

compose + "-" + "-" gives soft hyphen in most locales; it can be extended
so it work also on those that haven't defined a compose sequence for it yet.

> I have the suggestion that how about if we can control which characters
> are in which bidirectional types through other kinds of external configuration
> files. Then, let's say, under hebrew locale, if we want "minus sign" to be
> always written to the right then we just put "minus sign" codepoint into R type
> (right-to-left type). Then, everytime in hebrew locale, "minus sign" will be
> written to the right. This is just my opinion and it might need to be done
> in fri-bidi.

No, that is a very bad idea.
Remember that documents are meant to be read by others too: send to people with
other programs, other OS, displayed as html pages, etc.
If we use a different, incompatible, bidi algorithm; then we will be in the
same situation as users of MS-Windows are: they think that what they write
is standard and readable by everybody, but it is not.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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