Re: Emacs-bidi

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Thamer Mahmoud <neokuwait at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> 
[snip snip]
>
> As for RTL, I think the Arabic support in Emacs-bidi is merely
> adequate due to these (IMO) major problems:
> 
> ** As soon as you enable RTL editing/shaping you will see a huge
>    performance hit. This is not bad to the extent that the program
>    becomes unusable, but it makes things slow, especially with large
>    buffers.
> 
> ** The other problem is that it does not work with "Windows-1256"
>    charset. I use utf-8 for my outgoing mail and pipe the incoming
>    "Windows-1256" emails through "iconv". (Does anyone have a better
>    way of dealing with this inside of emacs?)
> 
> ** Plus the other limitations mentioned at the m17n.org site.
> 
> 
> Also a few days ago, I tried the upcoming "emacs-unicode-2" beta
> branch.  As far as i can tell, this is where the new bidi code is
> probably heading. It's active (ie. checkins are being made these
> days), but still no Bidi. The first thing that I've noticed though, is
> that now I'm able to enter Arabic letters (still unshaped) through the
> xkb extension by default. Nice!

Thamer, can I task you with (ie. put you in-charge of) being the one
that keeps us informed of what is going on with emacs proper and the
inclusion of bidi and shaping ?  What concerns me personally is the
want and need of Arabic support in emacs proper (and not an off-shoot
there-of like emacs-bidi).  As you note (and as has been listed on
GNU.emacs' mailing-lists), this topic got quite a bit of attention
about a month ago and the code was imported to a branch of emacs'
CVS - now we need to know if there are any issues holding up its
approval and if/when they need testers.  In short, we need to know
what we need to do to "push" this inclusion and its adoption.

  http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=emacs

    [*}check 'emacs-devel' and 'emacs-bidi' archives

Could you do that for us, be the one that bridges this very important
gab for the community ?  I'd also include you as the owner of this
topic on our global TODO list.

Thanks & Salam.

 - Nadim


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