Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
Am I correct that in some unbelievable way, we came to the decission
that the end-user should be familiar with the Unicode BiDi Alogrithm's
(UBA) workings? This is unthinkable, and at the same time quite expected
when the software is being designed by techies with no UI Design people
to overlook their work.
The user does not need to understand Unicode or the bidi algorithm. We provide the LRM automatically.
Agreed. I realize that we do this by heuristics, without involving the user.
The usere sees it and can delete it if he wants to.
Displaying, by default, characters that won't be printed is unprecedented. That's a big UI change we're doing here.
The effect is immediately visible, but why this precise effect has happened is non-trivial.The effect on the text is immediately apparent visually.
I can easily see how a casual user will percieve it as a "magic character", not understanding what it really does for his entire OOo-using-career. He might learn some rules of thumb, eventually, but he'll never understand it trully.
This is a self-teaching feature - if you can see the character that is causing theThere's no curve to learning it as 'rules of thumb'. Our software's behavior, though, should have as litttle mystery around it as possible. If we can implement a feature in a non-mysterious way (that is - staying in the user's metaphors domain), even if it makes our implementation more complicated, we should stick to the non-mysterious way.
change in the behavior. There's no learning curve here.
What *can* you find in the user's metaphor domain, you ask?
1. All characters are printed (for techies: have non-zero width).
2. Characters are for passing textual information, not for formatting control.
3. BiDi direction is a part of "formatting", not a part of the textual information (he perceives it similar to paragraph alignment).
4. "When I switch to Hebrew keyboard, I type right-to-left"
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