After four busy months at work I am back working on AW. Having browsed through the bugzilla, I am very pleased to see many good bidi bug reports, and I want to thank to all the reporters for taking their time for this, in spite of little being done about the reports recently. The bugs can be divided into several large groups (below), all of which need to be tackled prior to the 2.0 release; this will mean lot more testing, reporting, testing, reporting ...
Because of there being too substantial differences between the bidi code in the STABLE and HEAD trees, and because of my time being limited, I am only going to work on the HEAD, and will need bug reports based on the HEAD code (there are win32 binaries available from the website on daily basis). Main Problems ------------------ 1. GUI Bugs There are a number of problems with the bidi processing in the user interface. This mainly concerns the *nix port, but not exclusively. I have made some changes already that should be a start in addresing the *nix problem, and fresh feedback is needed. 2. Windows specific ordering bugs There are a number of problems with the bidi processing of the main window on Win32; these are caused by my past decision to use the win32 built-in bidi processing when it is there due to difficulties with turning it off. I have decided to have another shot on bypassing the built-in processing in the main window and relying on FriBiDi only, and I think I have come up with a way of doing that. The changes were commited earlier today, and I will need fresh feedback. (I personally can only test the code on non-Bidi Win98 at present, which behaves significantly different that the bidi-enabled versions of Windows, and works rather well.) 3. Rendering bugs There are a number of bugs with rendering of text on screen after basic editing operations (RTL text suddenly appearing left-to-right, etc.). I have a good idea where the problem lies, but bug reports with short reproducible examples are of great help here. 4. Document import There are a number of problems with document import from RTF and Word formats. These are the most difficult to deal with because they are often caused by bad design decisions taken by an unnamed company (let he who reads understand). The key here is again in every such problem being logged into bugzilla, with a short sample document and screenshots of what the rendering should be and what it is. I am confident that we can get the bidi work well by the 2.0 release, but I cannot do it on my own, so please keep the bugreports coming. Tomas
