On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Moshe Kaminsky wrote:
> Guy Baruch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [25/09/02 12:27]:
> >
> > There's something in this thread I may be a bit too simple to understand.
> >
> > I assume bidi support is really better than in current products, are the
> > algorithms
> > patented?
> This question never occured to me, and he didn't mention anything about
> it. I think that when he released the first versions, people were not
> patenting algorithms, and I don't think he ever published the algorithm,
> so my guess is that they are not patented. I'll ask him. Anyway, he
> claims (and I believe him) that bidi support in Qtext is significantly
> better than in M$ word.
Word8 (that is: Word97), you mean.
> >
> > if so, I'm not really sure what good will releasing _the source_ to public
> > domain will do, at least for law-abiding entities ( {persons} \subset
> > {entities} ... :) ).
> >
> > If , OTOH, there are no patents, than wouldn't releasing the source be
> > beneficial to other projects regardless of the porting effort ?
>
> Yes, assuming the people who work there are willing to read the source,
> extract the algorithms and apply them to those projects (which, I guess,
> might be quite a lot of work). If they *are* willing to do this, perhaps
> getting the algorithms will be easier than getting the source.
libbidiqtext may be nice, but...
Currently fribidi, IBM's ICU and QT3 both implement basically the same
algorithm for converting logical->visual text. (as defined in the unicode
standard). This standard does not define how an interactive application
that edits text should behave, and leaves a number of problematic issues,
but I tend to suspect that qtext's algorithms deviate from it.
Qtext itself is the immediate destination. The ability to read and do
something useful with qtext files would also be nice.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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