Eli Billauer
Tue, 03 Jul 2001 01:21:18 -0700
Hello all,
I've been trying to imagine what a working biditext system should feel like,
and I'm starting to think that if we want something that will be
user-friendly, we'll have to rethink a bit.
I can't see the big deal in remaining back compatible with such a .rev-file
based system. It's not like there is a lot of software depending on that .rev
file (well, there was some written over the last week :) ).
Let's try to think what would make a user feel comforable. In my opinion, the
switch from right to left should, if possible, be done on a window basis.
Meaning: Give a quick interface to change the direction in one window at a
time. The default may be set by .rev, if you insist.
The logic behind this? Let's face it: If you're running hebrew on Linux,
you're about to view files with both logical and visual Hebrew at the same
time. Let's imagine that you have two Netscape windows open, one page happens
to be in logic hebrew, the second in visual. I think that anything but a nice
way to switch only one of them, will be very annoying.
The nicest possible GUI, IMHO, is a little button on the title bar. Press it,
and the text in that window switches. The refresh can be done on the entire
window -- I think that the user will forgive a heavy refresh, if that ends up
with readable text.
This meaning playing with the Window manager. I think. Does the window
manager have any way to pass the application some attributes?
And let's drop any forks or threads. This is supposed to be a robust library,
working with any application, and there's no chance that any of us will think
about all the side effects of creating a monster with two heads. If that
means no recurrent polling of .rev, well, see my opinion above.
See you,
Eli