Elazar Leibovich wrote:
Isn't that wise that the language will be automatically detected by the input-language. ie, English letters will always be English, Hebrew/Arabic letters will always be Hebrew/Arabic and neutral characters will be the same language of the paragraph. That way, the user won't be forced to learn new key combinations to switch languages. I _think_ I can implement that with a little time, and a little (*cough* *cough*) help from the memebers here. Dov, what do you say?
I say: No! :)Abdel has been proposing this for a long time, but I feel quite strongly against it. I'll try to explain again why:
First of all, I don't see any problem with the current arrangement. A user is never "forced to learn new key combinations". This is LyX, not Word: if you don't like the key bindings, you can change them to whatever you want (more or less).
Secondly, I think there is a lot of value to having the keymap built-in to LyX. That means that you don't need to rely on keyboard support for Hebrew (in our case) on the machine you're working on. Admittedly, the machine you regularly work on probably does not present a problem, but if you're working, for example, on machines in a computer lab in some university abroad, you can't take that for granted...
Finally, and most importantly: one of the delights for me of working on bidi documents in LyX has been precisely the fact that I have explicit control over the language. Having explicit control allows you to do things that you just can't do with a plain old bidi algorithm, which what you're suggesting basically amounts to (though it would need to be much more complex than what you describe above; with regard to neutrals, for example).
I have recently started collecting examples of such texts. I hereby challenge anyone to produce in Word or OpenOffice (or any other editor --- it would be interesting to see what results we get; feel free to try in HTML as well, I doubt that it's possible without using the bidi override commands) the attached document, without mangling the logical order of the text typed in. (Sorry, Hebrew needed for this...). If you don't understand what the problem is, just try it... (I hope I don't eat my words --- but I'm having trouble trying to reproduce it in OO ;) )
That's why I like LyX's explicit language control :) . Dov
bidi-challenge.lyx
Description: application/lyx
bidi-challenge.dvi
Description: TeX dvi file
