RE: Directionality Standard

From: Waleed Oransa (WORANSA@eg.ibm.com)
Date: Thu Jan 10 2008 - 10:53:37 CST

  • Next message: Waleed Oransa: "RE: Directionality Standard"

    unicode-bounce@unicode.org wrote on 10/01/2008 01:54:27 Õ:

    > Waleed Oransa wrote:
    > > It's very important that the Unicode standard encode
    > > the original direction in the Bidi text. (...)
    > > The missing of a standard way to encode the directionality
    > > of the text (...)
    >
    > I tend to disagree with those statements. Unicode already offers the
    proper
    > encoding for allowing all this, using Bidi embedding controls. They are
    > enough for the intended purpose.

    We are not discussing "is Unicode offers such encoding", we are discussing
    how to
    activate the using of such cabability instead of lose it's value because
    no one
    is using it. What we need is a standard way to encode the directionality
    of the text
    that all Unicode-compliant component vendors respect.


    >
    > If you mean a way to encode something that shoul apply to the WHOLE
    text,
    > without limitation, then you'll limit the usability of the text, for
    example
    > in quotations with mixed scripts.
    >
    > BiDi embedding controls solve the problem cleanly. But it's still up to
    the
    > authors to use them when and where needed.

    That is the reason why it does not solve the problem because it's
    optional!!


    > I've not encountered any application where the simple addition of a
    single
    > embedding control was not enough to specify the correct ordering and
    > presentation of text, provided that they had the minimum needed to
    support
    > the existing BiDi algorithm (i.e. they need to accept the presence of
    these
    > controls, and not discard them or treat them as unknown characters
    displayed
    > with a "character missing" glyph. The incompatible applications anyway
    are
    > those designed only for basic Latin, and that were never
    internationalized
    > properly, or did not use any of the many i18n common libraries that have
    > been developed since long now, and integrated in almost all development
    > tools or runtime platforms. In most cases, even the simplest
    applications
    > can be recompiled without significant change, just by relinking them
    with
    > updated libraries so that they get the support of BiDi embedding
    controls.

    If you think in this as Arabic speaker who want to write English, will you
    be happy
    to add such marks by your self each time or should the tools supports
    retaining of your
    original text direction automatic. Even inserting RLE is not available in
    Web based
    application. of course this is a tool problem from your point of view but
    I would say
    that is because no clear specification in Unicode text and no clear
    guidelines
    regarding respect the directionality as very important attribute of the
    text SAME
    as any Arabic or Hebrew letter!

     
    >
    > The main issue that is more complicate to handle in application is the
    > layout of the GUI, however, this is a not related directly to the
    encoding
    > of text, but to user preferences. The text displayed in the GUI elements
    > should work properly even if they are not in a gui with RTL layout: they
    > appear as paragraphs within the layout, but the paragraphs are shown
    > correctly, even if they are not right-aligned (right alignment of the
    margin
    > is often possible in the application, including for LTR scripts, as a
    > presentation style option, if there's no global setting that can define
    this
    > style by default for the whole GUI layout. But even in this case, this
    is
    > NOT a problem of text encoding, and it's completely out of scope of
    Unicode
    > conformance rules.

    Of course, we are not discussing GUI layout.




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