Katoob and pending gtk+ patches

[dov at imagic dot weizmann dot ac dot il]

Salaam,

I hope this is the right mailing list for writing about katoob.

I have a while ago written some BiDi related patches to gtk+, that
are currently awaiting approval from the project leader Owen Taylor.
The major idea of the changes is that the paragraph direction will
no longer be controlled by the widget direction property nor by
the paragraph direction property, but will be calculated separately 
for each paragraph according its contents.  In short, the first 
strong (in the meaning of the unicode BiDi algorithm) character will 
determine the base direction and the alignment of the paragraph. 
Neutral paragraphs (that don't contain any strong characters) inherit
the direction of the previous paragraph, and if it is the first
paragraph in the file, it inherits the direction of its following
paragraph.

I realize that this patch somewhat breaks the way that katoob currently
works, though I believe it is for the better. I think that the 
heuristics implemented is more intuitive than manual setting of
the paragraph direction. In case of ambiguity, it is always possible
to add a zerowidth unicode control character in the beginning of
the paragraph in order to force its direction.

You may find the discussion as well as patches on the issue at:

    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70451

as well as bugs 118540, 118541, 118543 .

I'm now subscribed to this mailing list, so if you see any problems
with this approach, let's discuss it here.

Regards,
--
                                                         ___   ___
                                                       /  o  \   o \
Dov Grobgeld <dov at imagic dot weizmann dot ac dot il>              ( o  o  ) o   )
The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel              \  o  /o  o /
"Where the tree of wisdom carries oranges"               | |   | |
                                                        _| |_ _| |_