Re: your mail

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Lina Kemmel wrote:

> Hi Behdad, Jonathan,
>
> > I use gedit on a daily basis to type text with Persian and
> > English paragraphs, and I want my Persian paragraphs to be set ar
> > RTL and aligned to right, and English paragraphs LTR and aligned
> > to left.
>
> I doubt this opinion is shared by many... My own preference is to
> have all the paragraphs of a document of the same direction. (Even
> in the absence of a strong RTL stuff, I still prefer seeing e.g. a
> period to the left of the rest of text - provided my intention was
> to have a fundamentally RTL document.) ...And I'd only make use of
> markup in those rare cases when I wish the dominant direction to be
> overridden in a specific paragraph.

Then your preference does not follow common sense.  We are not
talking about personal preferences here.  Open a Hebrew
newspaper, type the text, it should render the way it is commonly
rendered in the paper, and that's what autodir does most of the
time.

> Automatic direction selection may cause confusion to end users.
> For example, when seeing the following *centered* text created by
> somebody else:
>
>     ltrLTR
>
> - how should I read it - as "l-t-r-R-T-L" or "R-T-L-l-t-r"? I have
> no idea of author's intention.

That doesn't have anything to do with auto dir.  That's the
intrinsic ambiguity of bidirectional scripts.  Say you see that
in an ad, how do you read it?  It's the same.


> > > For example, email addresses are always LTR,
>
> > No.  I want my email addresses with Persian name to be set RTL,
> > something like:
>
> >                                                               |
> >                     <something somewhere org> DOBHAFSE DADHEB |
> >                                                               |
>
> IMHO email addresses should always be LTR, even though start with
> a RTL name.

But you've already shown that your opinion does not necessarily
follow common sense ;-).

> Sorry, I can't agree that contextual direction treatment is a good
> design. Introducing it recently, by the way, is the only reason
> I'm not upgrading my GNOME...

You're welcome to bring a better design to the table, but "no
autodir" is definitely not that thing.


> > The bidi algorithm currently only handles plain text...
>
> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-11.html#Higher-Level_Protocols
>
> > ... and with my definition, email addresses are
> > not plain text.  I've already sketched a solution ...
>
>   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168108
>
> This link is currently not accessible...

I believe it is now.


> Thanks,
> Lina


Cheers,
--behdad
http://behdad.org/