On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:04:58 +0200
From: Omer Zak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: linux-il <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
Subject: Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection
Hello Jonathan,
I think I begin to understand what you are trying to accomplish. It is
indeed difficult to precisely select a text segment when there are
several spans of different directionality properties (LTR/RTL,
strong/weak, overrides, etc.) at its borders.
There are several possibilities for improving the selection GUI
look&feel in this case:
1. Turn off BiDi ordering for the entire file (useful by itself for
blind computer users; not directly related to our problem).
2. Manually turn off BiDi ordering for a text segment (say, a paragraph)
and then manually turn it back on.
This sounds best to me, possibly with (1) added by double/tripple-clicking
or similar signal.
3. Use the metaphor of using one hand to straighten out a piece of paper
when writing using the second hand (or straightening a piece of cloth
while doing needlework): turn off BiDi ordering 5 glyphs before and 5
glyphs after the mouse position (as the mouse moves, we suppress
ordering of differing glyphs). Have them displayed with background
having different color.
(The exact numbers are to be determined by usability tests, and be
user-configurable through a setup menu. So is the background color to
be used in this case.)
We would need to find a way to present this mechanism to blind or just
color blind users. Looks complicated to me.
4. Have a small pop-up window, which displays the text around the mouse
without BiDi ordering and let the user guide his mouse actions using the
pop-up display. The regular text display would be unchanged.
Sounds workable, but less simple that just turning off bidi re-ordering
for the current paragraph. Pop-up helper windows don't really fit in with
the Swing/JavaFX paradigm. It would work in OOo.
It would be nice to get Arabic speakers to be involved in this, as
Arabic presents a special problem - probably unreadable when the order
of glyphs is reversed without additional processing. Hebrew and Latin,
in contrast, are still somewhat readable even in reverse direction.
Excellent point. For Arabic displayed in an LTR context we would have to
use the stand-alone glyphs for each character as the joining of the glyphs
("rabt") is inherently RTL.
Regards,
- yba
--- Omer
On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 09:36 +0200, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:23:32 +0200
From: Omer Zak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: linux-il <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
Subject: Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection
From the discussion below, I understand that Shachar and me use the same
definition of "visual selection". You drag the mouse from column X to
column Y in the same row of the display, and get whatever text which
happens to be displayed between those columns (the text could have been
from different spans of the corresponding original text - "logical
text").
We agree on the meaning of visual selection.
Jonathan, can you clarify if you mean the same thing, or whether you
really meant "temporarily turn off BiDi ordering for a selected text
segment and display it"?
No, we mean temporaroly turn off bidi re-ordering for a text, do a logical
selection (which is now the same as visual selection) of some subset and
then revert the display of the whole text back to bidi ordering. Selected
text wold be always be displayed in the same ordering as the unselected
text.
- yba
--- Omer
On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 09:09 +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
Right, that's what the qualifier "in effect" means.
Visual selection, to me, means "selecting text from a continuous block
of visually ordered text". If the text is not visually ordered then the
selection cannot be considered "visual". I conceded that definitions may
vary.
I agree with Omer that visual selection does not seem all that useful to
me. I am at a loss to think of what use to the end user a selection
containing the end of the Hebrew part of a sentence followed by the end
of the English part of the sentence is going to be. Same goes for the
beginnings of the sentences combined.
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