> From: w...@zak.co.il (Omer Zak) > Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 22:57:06 +0300 > > On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 19:05 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > You know, it is quite ironic that, having heard about a major Free > > Software project which now fully supports bidirectional scripts > > including Hebrew, the first thing people here ask is how to disable > > that feature. Not whether it works, not if it's any good, not how > > well it supports this or that aspect of bidirectional editing -- but > > how to turn it off. A sobering experience, I must say. > > It is a question of control.
If you use Emacs, you know that giving the user control is one of Emacs's main design principles. I respond to some of your points below, but my point was that the last thing I expected from this community, during almost 3 years it took to develop bidirectional display engine, was that the first reaction would be "tell me how to turn it off". > The problem is that Gedit implemented BiDi support without the option to > turn it off. > > So when one wants to view BiDi text in visual order (the usual case), > one opens the file in Gedit. And when one wants to see it in logical > order (e.g. to figure out how the visual order turned out to be so > messed up), one opened it in Emacs. Suppose the visual order is never "messed up" in Emacs -- do you still need this switch? > Another use case is by blind computer users, who prefer to use Braille. > All BiDi Braille text must be laid out in logical order. So even if > your editor supports Hebrew Braille fonts, they are of no use if the > text is - too helpfully - printed out in visual order. I don't know enough about this, but isn't Hebrew Braille just an encoding of Hebrew letters using Braille characters? If so, then Braille characters all have string left-to-right directionality, and therefore will not be reordered for display by Emacs. But even if the above does not solve the issue, I would expect people to request that Emacs does TRT by default with Hebrew Braille, rather than turning bidi off. > Few years ago, when Abiword people were debugging BiDi support, I asked > for an option to turn it off for the benefit of blind Hebrew computer > users. This request was turned down. Well, I hope you agree now that Emacs is not Abiword... _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
