On 06/25/2012 11:22 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Mon, Jun 25, 2012, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: Linux HTML mail agent > with RTL and LTR paragraph explicit support": >> I disagree completely. The embedding control characters are designed >> for, well, embedding. What the standard[1] suggests, but does not >> require, is the use of the first strong directional character in the >> paragraph. The reasons this does not work for email are: > I remember how 11 years ago, when I wrote "bidiv", a simple command-line > tool to display Hebrew text files and emails (using the bidi algorithm > from fribidi), I had exactly the problems you described. While the > standard *does*, if I remember correctly, specify how the base direction > of each paragraph is determined I would use "recommends" rather than "specify". > no standard really specified what in a text file is a > "paragraph". And lucky for you that they don't. Even with the simple case of a plain text file, a paragraph is defined differently depending on whether the display is expected to do line wrapping or not. Had it said one thing, in all likelihood, your implementation would be non-conforming. > At the time, there was really no other tool for linux > for displaying bidi plain > text, so I hoped that this convention would be adopted by others. > I don't know if it ever was - I'm still hoping it is, or will be. > I certainly haven't seen a different convention. But my biggest fear > is Shachar's claim that: > >> 4. The only standard way to provide paragraph directionality in email >> is by sending it as HTML > I still believe that there's merit to plain text I agree. There is a lot of merit to plain text. However, displaying BiDi with plain text is difficult, and each implementation does it differently. The problem is further compounded for pre-line broken text.
If you want your Hebrew email to appear as you have written it, you need to send it in HTML. Shachar -- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd. http://www.lingnu.com _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
