"Maiorana, Jason" wrote on 2002-10-01 14:07 UTC: > >I would argue strongly that we do NOT want the console to do anything > >other than traditional VT100-style left-to-right text output. Bidi or > >quaddi output are best left to specialized applications > > I imagine though, that it would be possible to have a simple, cell > oriented terminal with a global writing direction vector(rowdir,coldir) > Then at least it would be possible to have a command line in pure > hebrew or mongolian.
A pure right-to-left or top-to-down mode would be rather trivial to implement, but I am skeptical it would be particularly satisfactory for any users. When interacting with Unix, it is unavoidable that you will always encounter lots of text in left-to-right scripts (English messages, domain names, how do you write English/Hebrew pathnames?, etc.), and I'm not sure how popular reading English in RTL form would be. But then, may be I underestimate the market for this. Have a look at http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/ to get a feeling for this (it has a bug/feature though: you have to type backwards). > Multi directional support is harder and the only appropriate level, I would argue. I think, the global market for purely RTL video terminals collapsed sometimes around 50 B.C. ... ;-) Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
