Re: Guidelines of a Logical UI for Editing BiDi texts

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Dov Grobgeld <dov imagic weizmann ac il> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> Matitiahu Allouche of IBM Israel <matial il ibm com> has kindly sent
> me the draft israeli standard document on the subject:
> 
>    Guidelines of a Logical User Interface for Editing Bidirectional Text
> 
> I have put his document on my web site at:
> 
>    http://imagic.weizmann.ac.il/~dov/Hebrew/logicUI24.htm
> 
> Mati would be very interested in getting feedback that may affect the
> standards draft (it has not been passed yet). 
> 
> But it is also interesting to note how the BiDi support in gtk matches
> the description of the draft standard. It appears that the major obstacle
> is one that has been discussed in this list in the past. Namely the
> automatic switching of the keyboard layout as a result of motion of the
> cursor over the different directional runs of the text.

Actually, this is not very hard to implement at all; probably an hour
of work or so. (You need to add gdk_keymap_set_direction() the
direction and implement it for X11, then hook it up in GtkEntry and
GtkTextView.)

I think the harder questions have to do with user expectations with
more global behavior - what happens when focusing different text edit
widgets, what happens for new windows, how is the current state
displayed to the user, etc. If only the user ever switches keyboard
group, then it's very predictable what happens; when you start doing
it on the users behalf, then there are a lot more possible areas of
confusion.

Regards,
                                        Owen