[gnome-love] Serious Problem with RTL Languages

[אנטולי קרסנר <tombackton gmail com>]

Hello,

I've been using Gnome for a few years and I realized that nothing,
including Gnome, can't solve a common problem with Right-To-Left
languages. I'm wondering, is there a way to solve the problem, or we
just have to give up? Before I take a look at some source code, I'll
like to hear what you experts have to say.

In some of the time I write and type in Hebrew (unless it's source
code...). In other times I type in English. Sometimes, actually it's
very common, I write a single sentence using words from both languages.
I tried to figure out why Gedit (or any text widget I ever used) can't
display the text the way I want it to, and I think I got it.

Imagine I start writing a sentence in Hebrew. I want the first word of
the sentence to be in English, and all the other words in Hebrew. How
should the text be displayed?

Aligment: to the RIGHT
Words: After the word in English, the next Hebrew word comes to its LEFT

Now imagine a different scenario. I write a sentence in English, in
which the second word in is Hebrew, but everything else is in English.
How to display:

Alignment: to the LEFT
Words: After the first word, which is in English, the second (Hebrew)
word should come at its RIGHT.

So I started typing exactly the same thing in these two cases, but I got
two very different options? How does the computer know which one I want?
The answer is, in most cases it doesn't. It makes a guess, and in half
of the times it's wrong, because there's no way to know without letting
the user give the computer some extra data.

I know Unicode has RTL/LTR symbols, but they don't seem to solve the
problem. Since I remember myself, I've been seeing those weird side
effects when typing mixed English and Hebrew. It really annoys me when I
chat with friends using Empathy. But it appears everywhere: LibreOffice,
Gedit, Epiphany... even on Windows, on web-geneated content...

It's like some disease nobody can cure. The question is: Is there some
technological barrier I'm not aware of, or it's reasonable to decide
it's about time to fix this problem?

(Come on, we can land a spacecraft on Mars, and we can't align text
correctly?)

I'll help gladly, but I'm not an i18n expert, so I decided to ask here
before I go hunting and fixing the problem.

- Anatoly Krasner