On 5/29/07, Dov Feldstern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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 ;) )
Well, have your words for lunch dude. Bon apetite.
In your example all English words are separated by neutral characters
like ," or space. In MS word, one controls the directionality of the
neutral characters by the input language. So that typing your text is
trivially translating from Lyx's
ENGLISH<change language through F12>, <change lang>ENGLISH
to:
ENGLISH<change language through alt-shift>, <change lang>ENGLISH
Try that at work. It's extremely easy to reproduce.
The bad thing about it, is that setting directionality to space, makes
it different from other spaces, and thus causing a great confusion. (I
once imported English plaintext to MS word, which made the
directionality of all spaces to Rtl, while the entire text was LtR. I
had no idea how all this funny things happened, and it was a challenge
to fix).
The same disadvantages goes for Lyx!
That's why I like LyX's explicit language control :) .
Dov
