Bidi terminal semantics

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 15 1999 - 10:22:05 EDT


I just discovered

  ECMA Technical Report TR/53
  Handling of bi-directional Texts
  http://www.ecma.ch/techrep/E-TR-053.HTM

which provides a nice short tutorial with examples on how to implement
the ECMA-48 bidi terminal emulation. The curious thing is that is also
describes a mode in which received characters have an implicit
directionality, very much like the Unicode bidi algorithm. But unlike
the Unicode bidi algorithm, ECMA TR/53 does not just discuss a flat
character stream, but also interactive editing, tabulation, and many
other things of concern to the developer of a VT100-style terminal
emulator.

It will now be interesting to see, how compatible the
ECMA TR/53 implicit directionality mode is with the Unicode
bidi algorithm, and whether it is possible to implement
a terminal emulator that follows both specifications.

Get

  ftp://ftp.ecma.ch/ecma-tr/t053-pdf.pdf

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:52 EDT