Hello, I've been using Gnome for a few years and I realized that nothing, including Gnome, can't solve a common problem with Right-To-Left languages. I'm wondering, is there a way to solve the problem, or we just have to give up? Before I take a look at some source code, I'll like to hear what you experts have to say.
In some of the time I write and type in Hebrew (unless it's source code...). In other times I type in English. Sometimes, actually it's very common, I write a single sentence using words from both languages. I tried to figure out why Gedit (or any text widget I ever used) can't display the text the way I want it to, and I think I got it. Imagine I start writing a sentence in Hebrew. I want the first word of the sentence to be in English, and all the other words in Hebrew. How should the text be displayed? Aligment: to the RIGHT Words: After the word in English, the next Hebrew word comes to its LEFT Now imagine a different scenario. I write a sentence in English, in which the second word in is Hebrew, but everything else is in English. How to display: Alignment: to the LEFT Words: After the first word, which is in English, the second (Hebrew) word should come at its RIGHT. So I started typing exactly the same thing in these two cases, but I got two very different options? How does the computer know which one I want? The answer is, in most cases it doesn't. It makes a guess, and in half of the times it's wrong, because there's no way to know without letting the user give the computer some extra data. I know Unicode has RTL/LTR symbols, but they don't seem to solve the problem. Since I remember myself, I've been seeing those weird side effects when typing mixed English and Hebrew. It really annoys me when I chat with friends using Empathy. But it appears everywhere: LibreOffice, Gedit, Epiphany... even on Windows, on web-geneated content... It's like some disease nobody can cure. The question is: Is there some technological barrier I'm not aware of, or it's reasonable to decide it's about time to fix this problem? (Come on, we can land a spacecraft on Mars, and we can't align text correctly?) I'll help gladly, but I'm not an i18n expert, so I decided to ask here before I go hunting and fixing the problem. - Anatoly Krasner _______________________________________________ gnome-love mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
