https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152125
--- Comment #10 from Eyal Rozenberg <[email protected]> --- (In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #6) > My question was how the RTL people would like to insert the control > characters. Personally, like I said - keyboard shortcut. That let's you use these marks as part of the flow of typing, or when modifying existing text - while looking at that text and navigating with the keyboard, which is easier than navigating to different positions with the mouse: The former navigates logically, the latter visually. But I may not be a "representative sample"... it's actually not easy to answer your question, especially considering how lay users simply don't know about these. > Sounds pretty simple to have a command "Make selection run from > left-to-right" and another one for the opposite (not sure we need this) and > insert the unicode characters before/after. That is not simple IMHO, and not a good idea for two reasons: 1. It involves state for a selection rather for a character. Without control chars, you just have characters with strong, weak or no directionality - and an RLM/LRM is the same thing, except that its width is zero. That is a simpler mental model than selections with direction state. 2. People who know the control characters, or who know what RTL and LTR is, would not be able to guess exactly what this command does just by reading it - and personally I would worry it does something complex and "scary", in the sense that it would clash with I can do manually. It's true that a help document alleviates that somewhat, but still. I was faced with a similar challenge for my RTL support extension for Thunderbird, and opted for the context section to have "Insert Control Character" submenu, with the items being: "Right-to-Left Mark" and "Left-to-Right Mark" - no option to insert something else. I might have added the acronym in parentheses, not sure why I decided against it. If we want to make the other control chars easily-insertable - and I'm not at all sure that we do - then I would keep those two entries at the top of the submenu, add a separator, then offer the other marks. > Second part is the feedback. Once you have inserted those zero-width > characters you probably want to know that. My take here was to use a > kind of vertical I-beam symbol (using the pilcrow-blue makes sense here). So, it's important this doesn't clash with other I-beam-like indications (like start or end of bookmarks?); and what happens when you also have a character border on the side, especially if it's a similar color. I'll make another suggestion - not rejecting yours, just a thought: Thinking about the visible/invisible toggle, I might let myself be more expansive and let the indicator take up space: An icon indicating the direction, e.g. a triangle or arrow, perhaps similar to what we have on the toolbar - but not with the pilcrow symbol itself, since it's not about the paragraph. The upside is that the meaning is better indicated, the downside is that it may significantly affect the text layout, causing words to overflow the line and move to another line, with that in itself having potential undesirable effect directionality-wise. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
