Re: Jumping Cursor. Was: Right-to-Left Punctuation Problem

From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Tue Aug 02 2005 - 00:31:18 CDT

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    David Starner wrote:
    > On 8/1/05, Gregg Reynolds <unicode@arabink.com> wrote:
    >
    >> RTL display
    >>and contextual shaping are relatively trivial. Bidi algorithmics are
    >>not.
    >
    >
    > Really? It seems like a pretty simple algorithm to me. In fact, a
    > three or four page well-defined algorithm isn't that big a deal.
    > There's freebidi (and ICU?) if you want to use someone else's code.
    >

    All in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I've had a number of
    developers tell me specifically that bidi was the show stopper. Easy or
    not, it adds cost that would be unneccesary if not for the bidi
    requirement.

    >
    >>Ask yourself, why does Emacs not yet support Arabic et al.?
    >
    >
    > Because Emacs decided to i18n by using ISO-2022 and took a long time
    > to get around to accepting Unicode even in conjunction with ISO-2022,
    > and there's no programmers specifically concerned with Arabic working
    > on it.

    And yet it supports tons of other scripts w/out bidi requirements. I
    have to believe that has something to do with bidi - it supports shaping
    and rtl at the word level, and I believe it supports Hebrew. I guess
    the argument is just that you wouldn't need programmers specifically
    concerned with Arabic support were it not for bidi, since that is what
    "arabic support" means in practice. Anyway I only meant emacs as an
    example of a widely used free sw package w/out good Arabic support. I
    guess I could be wrong about the whole issue of the cost of bidi, but
    that's part of the reason I'm posting these questions. ;)

    -gregg

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