Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Matitiahu Allouche wrote:

[snip]
This being said, my personal opinion is
that visual selection is a wonderfully intuitive way to perform something
which most often does not make sense.  In the cases where visual selection
is different from logical selection, which is when there is text at
different levels (different directions) between the starting and ending
points, the visual selection groups parts of text which are not logically
adjacent.  I see little likeliness that a user would want to copy or
delete just these parts and not all the text in between.

I think that we agree on this. The question is whether a feature like 
Omer's display order option would make the video behavior of selection a 
little more "logical".

Since logical selection is already implemented, if there are resources to
implement visual selection, I would say: add the visual selection but do
not remove the code for logical selection, and let the user choose which
way (s)he prefers by setting a preference or an environment variable or
whatever.

Right.

 - yba


And if Brian Beck does not like asymmetries, I have another one for him,
which IMHO is more harmful than the visual cursor movement versus logical
selection one: when you edit text (in JText or JTextArea components), the
component orientation is either LTR or RTL, it cannot be contextual.  But
for static text like JLabel, the orientation is contextual.  If you
capture some mixed Latin+Hebrew text in a text field and then display it
as a label, there are cases when it will look different in the label than
how it looked in the text field, and this is perceived by users as a BUG!
Since it is Working As Designed, maybe it is time to update the design.

Shalom (Regards),  Mati
          Bidi Architect
          Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts
          IBM Israel
          Phone: +972 2 5888802    Fax: +972 2 5870333    Mobile: +972 52
2554160




Omer Zak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
06/10/2008 19:13

To
linux-il <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
cc

Subject
Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection






Hello Jonathan,
I think that visual caret motion with logical selection is the best
approach.  I do not see visual selection as an useful feature at all (at
least if it means what I understand it to mean).

If anything needs to be improved, then add, as a feature, a mode to turn
off BiDi ordering in the visual display of a text fragment.  This will
make easier the lives of people, who edit text, which mixes together
several RTL and LTR spans together with plethora of punctuation marks.

Another audience for such a feature is blind computer users, who wish to
edit text in Hebrew.  They read it LTR in Braille, and would like to
suppress the BiDi algorithm for such text.  Therefore, they need to turn
off BiDi ordering for a whole file.

About the best way to implement such a feature (how to
activate/deactivate) and whether the text is to be displayed in-line or
in another window - I'm deferring to other people to make suggestions.

--- Omer


On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 18:50 +0200, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
What happened to ivrix.org.il?

Java Swing supports visual caret motion but logical selection. The
engineering decision for selection was based on technical realities
(read budget) rather than what was best for the bidi user. The asymmetry

of the situation never sat well with Brian Beck however. There is a
chance
to change this in JavaFX, if it is perceived as adding significant
value.
Is visual selection implemented in any bidi text editor?

How much of an improvement would it be to implement visual text
selection
in OpenOffice, in JavaFX? Would this be a killer feature to add to
Hebrew
OOo?



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