On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> 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?
Seems like a good idea.
However: what would such a support require? In terms of user interface,
mozilla already has the place for that. However, some care should be
taken to avoid making this behaviour the default.
Anyway, I'm not sure about the implemantation, as it will probably require
changing the underlying unicode-bidi library. Is it?
>
> 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?
It was more than a couple of monthes ago. It is a version of NS4.61 (this
means it can't be that new).
At the moemnt nobody (including netscape) pays too much attention to the
netscape 4.x codebase.
IBM has made availble libraries that, among others, implement the unicode
bidi algorithm:
http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/index.html
IBM *does* have a team that works on adding hebrew support in mozilla. It
is by now pretty stable.
Furthermore, since by now there are currently two usable web browsers for
linux that support logical hebrew (mozilla and konqueror), andbody who
really wants such a browser will be able to install it, and this is
getting easier (konqueror is already part of every new linux distro.
hopfully mozilla w/bidi will be there too soon enough...). So there is no
pressing need for porting that.
>
> Thanks,
> Hetz
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > Windows 2000 has a context menu, and Windows 9x let you enter RLM as
> > Alt+0254 (ugly, but works),and it would be quite easy to create a hotkey
> > for entering RLM in a more civilized way. However, the problem as
> > mentioned by Tzafrir Cohen, is that, because of Microsoft implementation,
> > people are not used to insert RLM when needed. The solution is, like in
> > many cases, education.
> >
> > Doing a hack for charset 1255 (Windows Hebrew) as proposed by Ilya
> > Konstantinov is, I think, a bad idea. This would really confuse people,
> > who most of the time are not aware of which charset they use,because this
> > is an obscure option in their mail or text editing software. Today, we
> > have incompatibility between Unicode conformant text and MS text, with hope
> > that MS will conform eventually. With this suggestion, we have
> > incompatibility forever.
> >
> > About Jonathan Rosenne's remark that "hyphen-minus is not a maqaf. Unicode
> > offers both a Hebrew Maqaf and a proper hyphen", I want to say that this
> > does not help a lot, because what we have on our keyboards is hyphen-minus,
> > so most users will use it anyway. And most people are not using Unicode
> > (yet?). Windows 1255 does not have a maqaf like Unicode. However, it does
> > contain Em-dash and En-dash (U2013 and U2014), so there is a solution.
> > Again, the problem is to educateusers to use it.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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