Re: arabic ispell

[Geoff Kuenning <geoff at cs dot hmc dot edu>]

In general, ispell doesn't deal very well with documents that have
multiple languages.  There is some emacs support for that idea, but
the command-line mode just refuses to consider the possibility. :-)
So I think that we can deal with bidirectional issues by ignoring them
for now. :-)

Given your discussion, I think that the easiest way to get ispell to
handle Arabic would be to support right-to-left display, but keep the
rest of the internal processing the same.  Since the display code is
somewhat localized, that shouldn't be horribly difficult.  (It should
be downright easy, but some parts of ispell have suffered from the
effects of 15 years of enhancements.)

I recall reading an article about how to format bidirectional text,
and it mentioned the shaping issue.  I'd forgotten about that.  Would
it be OK if ispell ignored shaping and just displayed the
untransformed version of the words?  That would certainly simplify
things.
-- 
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff at cs dot hmc dot edu   http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

If you find yourself wondering whether your partner really consented to
having sex with you...then they didn't.