Re: Adding Bidi to Fvwm ?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002 23:02:33 +0000
 "Mikhael Goikhman" <migo homemail com> wrote:
> On 21 Feb 2002 12:08:45 -0800, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> > 
> > With the recent work on multibyte support in Fvwm2 - has any thought
> > been given to those languages that are right-to-left oriented (Arabic,
> > Farsi, Hebrew, etc...) ?  In other words, have any considerations been
> > given to the addition of Bidi (Bi-directionality) ?
> > 
> >   http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/
> > 
> > May I suggest a compile-time option of including Fribidi (open source
> > Bidi library),
> > 
> >   http://fribidi.sourceforge.net
>
> I don't know whether I will add bidi support, but I may try to start it.
> At least I understand what this means. It is not trivial to immediately
> understand why this is needed and even less trivial to understand that
> it's all heuristics, there may be possible conflicts in any algorithms.

My understanding is, the inclusion of Bidi (even if it were enabled at
all times) should not adversely affect latin only characters that are
left-to-right (ie. the status quo).

>   % echo "hi 1-2 (english) is SHALOM 1-2 (IVRIT)." | fribidi -C CapRTL
>   hi 1-2 (english) is IVRIT) 2-1 MOLAHS).
>
>   # the second example seems like a bug in my fribidi, but maybe not

I'd agree that your second example should be something the fribidi
people should be informed of on their mailing list.  In passing there
are other Bidi implementations out there,

  http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/ucdata.html

The point was/is to consider Bidi's inclusion, the various "minor" issues
within ought to be taken care of in other forums.

> Actually, bidi is orthogonal to unicode and to aligment, i.e. it may be
> applied to a normal 256-symbol charset, and, I think, we may assume it
> only affects an order of symbols inside the string, not its alignment.
> 
> So, what I may do is to add --with-fribidi-{library,includes}, and try to
> figure out where this bidi filter should be added. But I am not sure yet
> what exact parameters should be used in all cases (MULTIBYTE or not) and
> what are the conditions when bidi should be applied at all.

As noted above, I'd contend that Bidi's inclusion should not and will not
affect all current external display calls.  In other words, passing in
latin (left-to-right) characters at all times will result in NO change
(ie. output = input).

 - Nadim


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