Lyx has an option of underlining the foreign text. What I meant was that I always turn that off, so I can't tell which direction the spaces belong to.
I don't mind that each space should have a definitive direction, I think the best way would be that the border spaces will always have the direction of the "mother" document, i.e. not of the foreign part. I wasn't thinking of the problems of the underlying latex code, but strictly about the visual editing, sorry. Miki "Georg Baum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Miki Dovrat wrote: > >> The users (at least me) don't know whether the space is RTL or LTR >> because >> they don't "mark RTL code" since it is annoying to look at when writing a >> document in RTL. > > I don't understand what you mean here. When you write a mixed > hebrew/english > document you have to explicitly set the language of the foreign part > anyway. The spaces would simply be part of this mechansim, no extra > "marking" required. > Whether this explicit language setting should be replaced by some > automatic > algorithm is a different issue that has been discussed. But even if such > an > algorithm is implemented the result is still that each character has an > associated language that defines the direction. > >> I don't know how difficult it is to code this, but I think the space >> should be "neutral", and that the direction should be decided according >> to >> whether the curser is currently to the right or to the left of this >> border >> space. > > And how would you output such a neutral space to LaTeX? If you have > visually > on screen > > RTL LTR > > where RTL is in RTL direction and LTR in LTR direction you need to decide > whether to output > > \R{ LTR}LTR > > or > > \R{LTR} LTR} > > to LaTeX. How would you decide which variant to use without an explicit > LTR > property of the space? At first glance it might look as if both are > equivalent, but this is not the case if other font changes (e.g. size) > come > into the play, and even if not your LTR font might have a different size > of > the space as your RTL font. This is exactly the reason why spaces are not > handled specially anymore for font changes, and are output exactly as > entered. > >> Lets say we have LTR RTL and the space between them. If the cursor is to >> the left - continue English (you will be able to type another space there >> and continue writing), and if you are to the right of the border space, >> continue writing Hebrew (again, you will be able to enter another RTL >> space there as well). Extra spaces should then be removed, like lyx does >> today. >> >> The same for RTL LTR. > > The non-magic approach could be made to work exactly like that: If the > cursor is at such a boundary with a space, set the current font that will > be used for newly typed stuff either to the font at the left or the font > at > the right, according to the rules you gave. Strictly speaking this is a > bit > of magic, but I believe that in contrast to the neutral space this magic > could be implemented in a reasonable manner, because it would only affect > editing. A neutral space would require extra code in may different places. > > The result would still be that each space has an associated direction, so > you could still create the other two cases of the four Stefan mentioned by > inserting and removing some temporary characters. > > > Georg > >
