In answer to Hetz's note (attached below), I suggest NOT to depart from the
standards, for the following reasons:
1) Any hack is likely to help some and harm some.
2) According to the Microsoft NLS person, MS intends to get in line with
the standard (Unicode). It will be quite funny if Linux bends the standard
to compply with MS, to find that MS is not there anymore.
3) When creating text, a better solution would be to implement something
similar to some of MS Word autoformat feature: when a hyphen-minus is
entered following a Hebrew letter and preceding a digit, it would be
automatically changed to En-dash. This would not be a breach of the
standard, only an "improved" input method. Of course, it must be possible
to turn this feature on or off.
About Hetz's question about porting Bidi support to the Linux version of
Netscape, I send you to the Linux-IL web site, which mentions the IBM
effort to develop Bidi support in Mozilla (the basis for Netscape R6).
Mozilla addresses multiple platforms, including Linux, and a version with
Bidi support for Linux has been built (still not ready for public
distribution).
Shalom (Regards), Mati
Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts
IBM Israel
Phone: +972 2 5870999 ext. 1202 Fax: +972 2 5870333
Mobile: +972 52 554160
Hetz Ben Hamo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 12/02/2001 12:00:07
Please respond to Hetz Ben Hamo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Matitiahu Allouche/Israel/IBM@IBMIL
cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: A question about a small "makaf"
Hi,
With all the respect, Mati...
"teaching people" is surely won't help around with this case at all. We
still
live in a country that the majority of people use Windows and people blame
their
PC that it's not working enough while the actual problems are at their
Windows,
and they're PC is perfectly ok..
Reality check: Most of the web pages which are designed to work with
Explorer
don't give a damn about Linux/Mozilla/Konqueror - so with the correct
situation
we'll be facing some funny/tragic reading (depends what you read and if you
forgot the "makaf" issue. It won't be funny to find your stock is "down"
just
because the "makaf" was in the wrong place you know)..
I would suggest to add an option to whatever browser/Hebrew implementation
- to
support this "makaf bug" and let people read pages normally...
Opinions?
BTW, Mati - IBM released few months ago Netscape 4.x with Hebrew support
for
Logical/Visual hebrew for Windows. Is there any effort to port these
changes to
Linux version of Netscape? Maybe other implementations that IBM Israel can
help
with the local Linux community?
Thanks,
Hetz
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
