Elazar Leibovich wrote:
On 5/29/07, Dov Feldstern
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.
It's nice to see that Word has finally got it, I'm quite certain that it
used to be problematic --- what version of Word is this in? OO is still
a problem, though again --- I'm testing 1.1.2 which is from quite a
while back, maybe it's been fixed there too...
But more to the point -- don't you realize that what you're describing
is exactly the way it works in LyX, except that you use Alt-Shift
instead of F12! If you were to change the language externally to Word (I
don't know if that's possible or not), then Word wouldn't (and couldn't)
know how to deal with it correctly, either. So I'm not sure what the
issue is...
The bad thing about it, is that setting directionality to space, makes
it different from other spaces, and thus causing a great confusion.
Correct. That's why I recently added a patch to LyX to mark the language
of spaces, as well --- at least it's a little easier to see what's going
on...
There is still a bug in LyX regarding this, see the thread
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.editors.lyx.devel/80783. I don't know
what the correct way to deal with this is (I have my ideas, I suspect
you won't like them... ;) ). But anyhow, IMO this is one of the more
important issues with Bidi right now. I would be happy to elaborate on
this more, but let's do that in a new thread called "Bidi GUI-backend
mismatch" or something like that...
(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!
Except that at least in LyX you can see what's going on, because the
language is marked.
But yes, dealing with complex bidi documents is not easy, that's the
nature of the beast. I've done it a lot --- writing Physics Lab Reports
in Hebrew, but using a lot of english terminology and math... And
again, I'm very happy with what LyX allows me to do: full flexibility to
do whatever I want, by giving me explicit control, and good feedback in
the GUI.
That's why I like LyX's explicit language control :) .
Dov
