Re "cat" (which should rather be "ls -1") with LTR vs. autodetected directionality:
Let's use the convention here that uppercase letters are fake Arabic, e.g. imagine that the word [written as LTR here] "ARABIC" is a valid Arabic word which is supposed to visually appear as "CIBARA". Let's have two files, called "english.pdf" and [written as LTR here] "ARABIC.pdf". Let's run "ls -1". First, let's run it in a fully LTR environment. "english.pdf" should appear like this, left-aligned, it's obvious. What's the best rendering of the other filename? Should it look like "CIBARA.pdf" or "pdf.CIBARA"? Should it be aligned to the left or right edge of the terminal? Why? I, who can't read Arabic, would argue that a left-aligned "CIBARA.pdf" would be the least confusing for me (i.e. I prefer the look in your LTR screenshot), but others, especially those who do read Arabic, might disagree with me and prefer some other rendering. What is your take on this? Now, let's run it in a fully RTL environment, e.g. the user has set up as much as reasonable to RTL, most of the filenames are RTL, however, an English one, and an Arabic one with an English extension, have sneaked in. What output would you prefer from "ls -1" and why? Should the English filename appear as "english.pdf" or "pdf.english", should it be aligned to the left or the right edge of terminal? And the same question as in the previous paragraph: Should the Arabic filename look like "CIBARA.pdf" or "pdf.CIBARA", and should it be aligned to the left or right edge? What output format would you expect from regular "ls" (using multiple columns), given a mixture of plenty of similarly crafted filenames? What output format would you expect from "ls -l"? Plenty of questions, plenty of possible answers. E.g. for "ls -1" in RTL environment, I asked two questions, 4 possible answers for each, that's 16 possible combinations. Many of them are obviously bad, but still, probably there won't be a clear winner, I'd guess there will be 2 or 3 candidates, with some subjective weighting between them. Once we have an answer to these questions, the next question should be: whose responsibility is it to implement that behavior? Is it the terminal's, or ls's, or a cooperation between the two? Finding the good answer will require deep understanding of the problem space and examining many other utilities as well. You can't just conclude from the output of 1 particular utility using 1 particular command line switch that enabling autodetection would be an overall win across thousands of use cases. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-terminal in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2002290 Title: Poor Arabic rendering in VTE Status in gnome-terminal package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Status in vte2.91 package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: VTE has a number of issues when it comes to rendering Arabic letters in the terminal, which could affect a number of languages (Arabic, Urdu, Persian... etc). Bug 1: Any Arabic word in any VTE-based terminal is choppily displayed with spaces between its letters, making readability hard and sometimes not possible. Sometimes the letters are crushed together very closely making reading impossible too. Bug 2: If a non-Arabic text and an Arabic text are displayed together in the same line, then the entire line will be missed up and you won't be able to understand what is being said. Both of these bugs can be seen from the image I attached. I reported both of these bugs together because it's unlikely they can be fixed separately, probably they are related to each other. Problem can be seen in any VTE-based terminal. Here I am using GNOME Terminal 3.44.0 on Ubuntu 22.04, but it can be seen in any Ubuntu version and in any terminal version as well (it has been there since forever). I reported the bug here instead of upstream because that's what they said at the page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/ReportingBugs, but this bug is not related to Ubuntu only; it happens on all Linux distributions. Happy to provide any information you need, or any do tests or experiments. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/2002290/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
