(I do remember googlin and greppin around before starting to mess with symbol files - probably did not do that very well - since now I can easily find the stuff you mention...)
Herouth Maoz wrote:
Actually, OpenOffice behaves better than you said. When you enter the characters you may get a square, but as soon as you put some text next to them, the squares disappear. At least that's what happens in my environment.
Did you try the PDF symbol? It seems that at least with the default fonts, PDF stays a visible square, while others appear as specialized cursor-like graphics.
By the way, the lyx keyboard variant only contains the marking characters, not the embedding characters.
IS mode too. So - my messing with symbol files was not a total waste of time after all :-) ...
I had a discussion about this in Whatsup this week. I see embedding as more natural, as you don't have to think "Hmm, BiDi problem. If I put an English character somewhere, it should solve it, now what is the proper way to put the extra character?". You just embed the whole English phrase.
What's more natural is arguable and subjective. However - LRE/RLE are more *powerful* . There's stuff that just can't be done with the mark symbols alone.
For example try typing the following line (I do hope the listbot and mailers won't mess up my UTF8 ... ):
------------>
The message â"××× ×× ××× Enter ×××××"â should be displayed
<------------
I can't see how it could be done with Mark symbols alone.
With RLE-PDF it's trivial.
I just wonder, if I find how to incorporate the LRE, RLE and PDF characters into the lyx variant, how I'm going to push it to the world. The lyx and SI variants are distributed with every Linux, or at least with every Linux that has KDE.
It's not related to KDE (and really should not be bound to any specific toolkit). It's a standard *Unicode * feature - available on any system using X11 ever since it started supporting Unicode.
As I now learned, the standard israeli keyboard layout in main XFree86 distro started having the "Mark" bidi symbols ever since version 4.3 IGLU FAQ:xkb <http://www.iglu.org.il/faq/index.cgi?_recurse=1&file=8#file_86>
About pushing it to the world - this mainly concerns the Hebrew and Arabic speaking countries.
As far as the Hebrew-Speaking Country is concerned, at least, I believe Tzafrir is our man here (pls correct me if I'm wrong, but he might have had something to do with the fact that the lyx variant found it's way to upstream Xfree86 il keyboard).
For starters, we can agree on preferred keys to put them on, and offer it in a modified version of the script I provided in the previous message. The benefit of this script is that it's simple, self explanatory, and can be easily operated by newbie linuxers (just drop it in /usr/local/bin and type bidisetup - in any user login) - it supports easy install/uninstall/enable/disable without having to type xkb commands or manually edit keyboard files.
This way a larger croud can experiment with it and give feedback. For the moment I'll stick with my original (inconvenient & arbitrary) choice of keys - because Tzafrir's layout does not include the remaining two unicode bidichars (RLO & LRO), and I believe we should offer our testers the full range of unicode bidi.
This time I'll provide the file via http (the listbot does not seem to like my attachments)
http://amitar.parser.co.il/bidisetup
( yeah, I know, I should add friendly html descriptions and stuff, preferably in hebrew ... )
pls feel free to edit/mangle/distribute this file in any way you want.
By the way, I think this is not the ultimate solution to this problem. Because the characters are invisible, it makes editing them very hard. I prefer the word processor itself to handle this - as Word does in Windows and Mellel does on MacOS X. In Word you mark spans of text as English or Hebrew and it
True - we're talking just the basic OS/WinSystem support here. These should support "unicode plaintext" in a way that would allow typing i9nal text in a reasonable way in text consoles and simple text editors. I think that means that bidi chars should be invisible - like tabs and newlines are in text mode.
As for Word-Processors (and WYSIWYM Document Preparation Systems ;-) ), I think they could (and should) allow a more advanced approach: You should be able to see a graphical representation of the bidi chars (e.g. in OpenOffice - in that mode where you can see the enters and tabs), and you should be able to easily switch to WYG view, where they are invisible.
However - this is application stuff and could only be achieved app-by-app (well - not exactly - if we fix the basic text-editing widgets of Toolkits like GTK+ & QT, we'll probably affect a whole bunch of Gnome & KDE apps at once.
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