On Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 11:34:15AM -0500, David L. Johnson wrote:
> ---Reply to mail from Joacim Persson about easy $100 for nazgul? ;)
>
> >
> > I just had a look at http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/, someone offers $100
> > for a Hebrew capable editor for Linux. (just a matter of recompute the
> > coordinates here and there to get right-to-left editing? =)
>
> Right-to-left editing was one of the goals of Xword. I tried that back
> when they got started, and it was a mess. It may have been due to their
> poor design decisions, but R-to-L editing didn't work well at all.
>
> That could mean that it would be a very difficult thing to enable, though
> certainly it would be a welcome feature for some languages. I gather that
> LaTeX supports (somehow) Hebrew, so it might indeed be possible if the
> display issues are not too difficult.
>
Latex does support hebrew, although it takes some extra effort. There's
something called tex--xet (I think there's also something called tex-xet
which is different!) that lets you do it. I believe it requires recompiling
the latex "kernel", though to let you switch between R-to-L and L-to-R. The
output is pretty cool looking. I guess we'd assume that anyone planning on
doing it had the right kind of latex (or somehow we'd configure test for
it...).
I know R-to-L is planned for 1.1 (1.3?). I don't think it's *too* hard. For
example, vim can do R-to-L...
And by the time 1.1 is out, $100 will probably be enough for a Pentium II.
-Amir
