Re Diego: You are basically right. I'd like to add a couple of points.
As for complex apps such as mc, your approach (2) cannot work. This is because the BiDi algorithm would not just need to shuffle around characters that are visible in the terminal; it might need to pull offscreen chars onscreen and vice versa. E.g. think of mcview's unwrapped display mode, and long lines so that you need to scroll horizontally to read the file. In order to properly display the BiDi text, the terminal would need to be aware of the entire logical line of the file, however, the application (e.g. mcview) simply doesn't give this data to the terminal. So, for complex apps it's solely your approach (1), that is, BiDi done in the applications that can work. On the other hand, it's a reasonable expectation that a simple "cat" produces readable text. Hence a terminal emulator should, by default, probably perform a BiDi for each logical line (that is, between explicit newlines). Which brings in a further question about how further cursor positioning or character overriding should work in this case. I've discussed it in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321490#c29, I believe #2 there would be the right thing to do (and the one that does not terribly break the look of ncurses apps). So, we would already need two terminal modes, probably controllable via an escape sequence. Implicit BiDi (the default) is when VTE applies the BiDi algorithm (this is I guess what konsole does), which fixes simple utilities, whereas probably breaks complex apps big time. And an explicit BiDi where VTE reverts to its current behavior, that is, does not do any BiDi, to be used by apps that perform the BiDi algorithm themselves. I _guess_ this is what ECMA TR53 (also discussed in the aforementioned link) might be about, although I haven't had the chance to study it. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to vte in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/263822 Title: RTL (right to left) support in terminal (BiDi) Status in Gnome Virtual Terminal Emulator: Confirmed Status in vte package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Binary package hint: gnome-terminal The program fails to display bi-directional text correctly. For example, the Arabic word Went (راح) should be spelled raa (ر) Alif (ا) haa (ح) from right to left. The program displays the Arabic text in the opposite direction. examples: ا ب ج become ج ب ا if the problem with numbers (and it's not) it will look like: 123 become 321 that makes many translated terminal applications messages unreadable like dpkg & apt-get ProblemT ype: Bug Architecture: i386 Date: Tue Sep 2 04:44:06 2008 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04 ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-terminal Package: gnome-terminal 2.22.1-0ubuntu2 PackageArchitecture: i386 ProcEnviron: PATH=/usr/locusernamel/sbin:/usr/locusernamel/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/gusernamemes LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/busernamesh SourcePackage: gnome-terminal Uname: Linux 2.6.24-19-generic i586 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/vte/+bug/263822/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
