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Re: emacs shaping



On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 00:17:36 +0200
 "Chahine M. Hamila" <hchahine> wrote:
 >
 >Nadim Shaikli wrote:
 >
 >> Salam again,
 >>
 >> I had noted earlier that shaping is possible in emacs without too much
 >> effort. What I had neglected to say was that it is possible through the
 >> usage of multiple keys -- in other words to write a "seen" that is in th
 >> middle of the word, I can make is so that when the user presses on the "s
 >> key he/she would get one form of the letter, pressing the "s" key again
 >> would result in a different form, pressing it the third time would go t
 >> yet a third.
 >
 >Okay after my last email I guess pretty much is cleared up. I would
 >personally advise you to forget about contextual formatting and rather
 >focus on mirroring. It shouldn't be very complicated I guess, and would
 >make it possible to go forward on another software while considering
 >(x)emacs (emacs and xemacs have about the same packages, developping
 >something for one requires little to no effort to be used on the other)
 >to be "sufficiently" Arabized (once the keyboard maps and the bidi input
 >fixed). In case you really want to do contextual formatting, it should be
 >done automatically by (x)emacs. It is not just ideally:) since you'll hav
 >to store the characters independently from their shape anyway, so loadin
 >a file will have to be analysed again (see my explanation about encoding
 >in the previous mail).

Chahine, you got to remember that I know close to nothing when it comes to
elisp -- as noted, I have all the Mule encodings done -- I can now limp about
and write my name in Arabic (well, I have to start backwards :-).  Let me
know if you need the new code (I can either mail it directly to you or I
can upload it somewhere (CVS doesn't make sense since this is not a complete
package)).

BTW: I already sent the info to comp.emacs - let's see what they say.

Here's the thing.  I don't know how to go about mirroring things - if you tell
me how to do it and where to look (to learn), I'll gladly do it.

For what its worth - what I've done is not complete by any sense of
imagination, I just wanted for Arabic to be on equal footing compared to
Hebrew when it comes to emacs and to stay that way (I think I accomplished
that).

Another thing to note, TAKAHASHI Naoto <ntakahas at m17n dot org> one of the original
authors of MULE responded recently to me noting that all the multibyte code in
emacs has been rewritten and Arabic ought to work - it won't make it into
emacs-21.1 but maybe later -- I asked him for a patch and he said he'll get it
to me as soon as he gets a chance.

So with that said, should we do anything further on emacs -- or maybe we're
better off doing something different and waiting for this Japanese guy to mail
us his patch which we could continue work on (if there is anything to be done
there).

BTW: thanks for your previous encodings email :-)

I'll send another email with my suggestions on what's next (in my mind).

 - Nadim