Re: [putty] Broken Bidi in PuTTY

[Simon Tatham <anakin at pobox dot com>]

Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> Simon, I just downloaded the "latest development snapshot" PuTTY binary [1]
> and it looks like its Bidi support is either broken or disabled for some
> reason (my guess is that it was mistakenly disabled on purpose).

I haven't done anything that _should_ have broken it, so if this is
true then it's certainly a bug that needs fixing.

>  + 2004-12-02:r2941  Works great without issues
>  + 2004-12-19:r5011  Seems to be broken

(Presumably you mean 2004-12-02:r4941 :-)

> I simply looked at a mixed Arabic/English file and it looks like the Arabic
> is being rendered properly its just not being flipped so instead of reading
> HELLO, I'm seeing OLLEH (given caps are Arabic).

I'm afraid I can't reproduce this. However, it's rather difficult
for me to test bidi on Windows in any case, since I don't know of
any fixed-pitch Windows font that supports Arabic. Do you have any?
I looked through the Khotot page on arabeyes.org, but none of the
TTFs there appear to be fixed pitch.

When I try displaying my small UTF-8 test file (currently checked in
to the PuTTY source repository as putty/testdata/utf8.txt) I get
nothing but rectangular blobs, but the blobs appear to be arranged
in the right order as far as I can see (cursor position mapping and
selection all appear to do the right thing). Do you see the problem
with that file? If not, can you send me a file that _does_ exhibit
the problem, and I'll add it to my test collection.

If I test on Unix (using the ae_fonts_mono font), everything seems
to be displayed in the right order.

> BTW: I haven't forgotten about getting a few people to look at the
>      miniBidi code for sanity checks.  M.Elzubeir, M.Sameer - care
>      to lend a hand ?

I've actually made one pass through the code myself fixing array
overruns, which could easily be what broke it! :-) More eyes are
always helpful, though.

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "A defensive weapon is one with my finger on the
<anakin at pobox dot com>    trigger. An offensive weapon is one with yours."