Re: your mail

[Lina Kemmel <LKEMMEL il ibm com>]

> Re: your mail

I do not see any reason for referencing this mail,
provided
one with the subject line fixed was submitted immediately.

> > > 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.

The "common sense" here seems like yet another "personal
preference".
There is no stuff of mixed left/right alignment and
[supposed to be
treated as of mixed] paragraph direction in a newspaper.
E.g.,
paragraphs in a Hebrew newspaper are entirely RTL,
as defined by a
"higher level protocol" -- preferred paragraph
direction associated
with the language they are written in.

> > 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 ...

No, it does.  When the paragraph embedding level
is constant
(and as a rule you are aware what this level is),
the thing
loses any ambiguity. On the contrary, with the automatic
dir,
ambiguity of *mixed* Bidi text persists.

> ... Say you see that in an ad, how do you read
it?  It's the same.

I read it in the same way as I use to read a newspaper
-- applying a
"higher level protocol".
Anyway, even the same level of ambiguity doesn't give
any pros
or cons to either approach.

The both are permissible, and to suit different "personal
preferences" there must be some way to switch
between them.