If you do usability tests, you will generally find that users prefer a
visual approach. It is much easier to explain and to understand visual
selection than logical selection. This being said, my personal opinion is
that visual selection is a wonderfully intuitive way to perform something
which most often does not make sense. In the cases where visual selection
is different from logical selection, which is when there is text at
different levels (different directions) between the starting and ending
points, the visual selection groups parts of text which are not logically
adjacent. I see little likeliness that a user would want to copy or
delete just these parts and not all the text in between.
Since logical selection is already implemented, if there are resources to
implement visual selection, I would say: add the visual selection but do
not remove the code for logical selection, and let the user choose which
way (s)he prefers by setting a preference or an environment variable or
whatever.
And if Brian Beck does not like asymmetries, I have another one for him,
which IMHO is more harmful than the visual cursor movement versus logical
selection one: when you edit text (in JText or JTextArea components), the
component orientation is either LTR or RTL, it cannot be contextual. But
for static text like JLabel, the orientation is contextual. If you
capture some mixed Latin+Hebrew text in a text field and then display it
as a label, there are cases when it will look different in the label than
how it looked in the text field, and this is perceived by users as a BUG!
Since it is Working As Designed, maybe it is time to update the design.
Shalom (Regards), Mati
Bidi Architect
Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts
IBM Israel
Phone: +972 2 5888802 Fax: +972 2 5870333 Mobile: +972 52
2554160
Omer Zak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
06/10/2008 19:13
To
linux-il <[email protected]>
cc
Subject
Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection
Hello Jonathan,
I think that visual caret motion with logical selection is the best
approach. I do not see visual selection as an useful feature at all (at
least if it means what I understand it to mean).
If anything needs to be improved, then add, as a feature, a mode to turn
off BiDi ordering in the visual display of a text fragment. This will
make easier the lives of people, who edit text, which mixes together
several RTL and LTR spans together with plethora of punctuation marks.
Another audience for such a feature is blind computer users, who wish to
edit text in Hebrew. They read it LTR in Braille, and would like to
suppress the BiDi algorithm for such text. Therefore, they need to turn
off BiDi ordering for a whole file.
About the best way to implement such a feature (how to
activate/deactivate) and whether the text is to be displayed in-line or
in another window - I'm deferring to other people to make suggestions.
--- Omer
On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 18:50 +0200, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
> What happened to ivrix.org.il?
>
> Java Swing supports visual caret motion but logical selection. The
> engineering decision for selection was based on technical realities
> (read budget) rather than what was best for the bidi user. The asymmetry
> of the situation never sat well with Brian Beck however. There is a
chance
> to change this in JavaFX, if it is perceived as adding significant
value.
> Is visual selection implemented in any bidi text editor?
>
> How much of an improvement would it be to implement visual text
selection
> in OpenOffice, in JavaFX? Would this be a killer feature to add to
Hebrew
> OOo?
--
42 is the answer to everything. Food is the answer to everything except
obesity.
My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/
My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone.
They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which
I may be affiliated in any way.
WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
