Re: Typing Right-To-Left language characters in GtkEntry

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Edward H. Trager wrote:

> Just a little note I would like to add here: mlterm (http://mlterm.sourceforge.net)
> is the only terminal emulator I am aware of that seems to work somewhat OK for Arabic
> (for example, you can use the terminal version of vi or vim to edit a document containing
> Arabic.  As far as I can tell, one has to more or less stick with using the bitmap GNU unifont
> in order to maintain legibility in the terminal, but it does seem to work).
> It would be nice if Gnome's gterminal or KDE's konsole could handle
> Arabic and other complex-text-layout (CTL) scripts.  Have others had this wish too?
> I have a partial idea of what some of the issues are, but I'm sure my understanding of these
> issues is incomplete.

That's the last thing I like to see working.  The terminal
emulator is simply not receiving enough information to apply
the bidirectional algorithm correctly.  Vim, Emacs, ncurses,
slang, etc should implement CTL inside if they want.  A very
simplistic bidi support can be implemented in the terminal, which
is what mlterm (and BiCon to some extents) do.  That works when
you are sending an stream of characters to the terminal, but as
soon as escape-sequence tricks start, it fails miserably.

>  - Ed Trager
>    Bioinformatics, Kellogg Eye Center
>    Univ. Michigan, Ann Arbor

--behdad
http://behdad.org/