Re: BIDI tags Unicode values

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2002 at 04:11:45AM +0300, Alaa The Great wrote:
> 
> and strong directional characters means??

All Arabic letters are strong directional characters. Unicode categorizes
character types into "Strong", "Weak", and "Neutral". The 'Strong' types are
L, LRE, LRO, R, AL, RLE, RLO. AL (right-to-left Arabic, which includes
all the Arabic alphabet and punctuations [among other things.])

Reference table 3-7 of the UAX#9

> does it mean that the editor should guess the direction according to
> the first character or the dominant language in the paragraph??
> this makes sense I suppose.

Yes. Or the editor uses a library to do that for it. Generally the first
test would be the first character in the paragraph.

> however it seems the pango API supports BIDI control characters, just
> try to right click in the katoob textbox.

Sure.. but it is not wise to assume others will follow suit.

> well the solution then is to have another feature to save without
> these sometimes problematic characters, and katoob has just the
> feature, you can choose to save in UTF-8 encoding (which will include
> the control characters) or save in text only UTF-8 which will not save
> the control characters.
> I think this is a reasonable solution for the problem.

> what remains is to decide if we need to alter the katoob interface to
> make the characters easily accessible and editable or if they are to
> be considered harmful and thus are best left hidden where only those
> who really need them can find them.


That is of course up to M.Sameer. My suggestion is to never go there. It
encourages bad practice. Adding bidi support is all that is needed. Look into
FriBiDi (http://fribidi.sf.net/), you don't have to implement the actual
algorithm, it's already done for you.

> 
> to me being able to choose the direction of the paragraph and the
> order of words regardless of the direction of display is a fundemental
> feature, I still don't see how it is not needed, maybe I'm missing
> something.

You are missing bidi support ;) It's where all the problems of Arabic support
revolve around.. and thanks to the UAX#9, they are not simple problems.

> its not a problem to me, its mohamed we should worry about.

Heheh.. Mohammed is taking the fifth ;) 

later
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