Hi!Myself and Dov Feldstern are working on the support for Right-To-Left languages in LyX. In the latest RC1 there are many things which are not the way they should be. As we are not using Right-To-Left ourself we lack a bit the experience how it should look like and what is most convenient.
To get it right WE ARE LOOKING FOR:PEOPLE USING RTL languages and who are able and WILLING TO TRY OUT PATCHES
against the subversion code and to compile it.You don't have to be a developer, just user of a RTL language who wants to have LyX 1.5 to behave the right way (tm).
One decision which is open and must be settled: THE SPACE ISSUE ===============What we are investigating right now is the handling of spaces on the boundary of RTL and LTR text. Take a look at the picture. The blue underline marks the character which have a RTL font. So the picture shows the four cases possible.
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There are several possibilities now to interpret the underlined spaces (short RTL spaces):
* The LyX 1.3 magic way: the RTL spaces behave in fact like LTR spaces, i.e. they are put where non-underlined spaces would be. See this example:
- In "english WERBEH_english" the _ is in fact behind the W
So in Latex you would write "english\R{HEBREW } english"
The consequence is that the cursor strangely (IMO) jumps from behind
the W to the right in the moment you enter the space. If you have
used LyX 1.3 you might be familiar with this behavior:
"english |WERBEHenglish" ==> "english WERBEH_|english"If you continue now typing a character the cursor (and the space) jumps back:
"english WERBEH_|" ==> "english |H_WERBEHenglish" ==> "english H_WERBEH_|english"* The non-magic way: the spaces are no special characters. They stay at the position you type them. See this example:
"english |WERBEHenglish" ==> "english |_WERBEHenglish" ==> "english |H_WERBEHenglish"If you change back to English and continue typing the cursor will go to the right, i.e.:
==> "english H_WERBEH|english" ==> "english H_WERBEH |english"
In Latex you would type the same:
"english \R{HEBREW H} english"
Of course two spaces, one inside the RTL, one outside, are merged
silently by Latex,
i.e. "english \R{HEBREW }" will look the same as "english \R{HEBREW}".
If you have an opinion, please tell us.
Thanks
Stefan Schimanski
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