Re: yudit + bidi

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

I'm taking this conversation public in hopes of soliciting some
help and in order to get some ideas/volunteers to look into these
various issues (the more eyes on this the better :-)

--- Gaspar Sinai <gsinai yudit org> wrote:
>
> I fully agree with you on Yudit's half-baked bidi support.
> Unfortunatelly with the current design of Yudit it would be very
> tough to make fribidi work inside Yudit unless the algrothm in
> reversible.

"very tough" but not impossible :-)  If there was help along the
way, would that simplify fribidi's inclusion ?

> Do you think fribidi could be modified to add a special marker
> integer to the re-ordered characters that could be used to convert
> back the characters that are displayed? As is, it is irreversible,
> but I think with the markers it might be made reversibe.

I think anything is possible given enough rational thought and
underlying reasons :-)  The fribidi folk has been very helpful and
open to ideas and would certainly correspond on their mailing list
regarding any additions you might want to be implemented given a
reasonable benefit to others out there.

  http://fribidi.sf.net
  http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fribidi-discuss

Do also note that fribidi "maps the positions in the visual string to
the positions in the logical string" (position_V_to_L_list).
 
> If that were possible we could easily integrate it with Yudit.
> I would like to make bidi work better...

Obviously without knowing much about the code, let me be naive in
asking for the following,

 1. could you please add a '-noshape' option to uniprint to disable
    its current shaping (shaping without Bidi does more harm than good).
    With the '-noshape' option we can use uniprint through the pipe'ing
    method to get reasonable results in processing arabic.

 2. Yudit's need for the algorithm to be reversible is there
    for sanity-checks or is it integrated into its core somehow ?
    In other words, what are its benefits (sans the potential
    security concern you note on yudit.org's website).  I'm just
    trying to make a case for why people should consider it.

Regards,

 - Nadim


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