Quoth Nicolas Williams on Thursday, 09 December 2010:
> On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 07:25:11PM +0200, Amit Ramon wrote:
> > Nicolas Williams <nicolas.willi...@oracle.com> [2010-12-08 13:25 -0600]:
> >
> > >On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 09:17:02PM +0200, Amit Ramon wrote:
> > >>Chip Camden <sterl...@camdensoftware.com> [2010-12-08 11:01 -0800]:
> > >>>On a related topic, is there any way to get mutt to display RTL for
> > >>>certain characters? The Hebrew characters in your signature, for
> > >>>instance, are displayed LTR in my mutt, so they read backwards.
> > >>
> > >>Not directly. For that you have to use a bidi-aware terminal. I'm
> > >>running Mutt in Mlterm terminal emulator, which can handle LTR and RTL
> > >>quiet well (but not perfectly).
> > >
> > >I agree, this is a job for the rendered, which is also why you shouldn't
> > >need your plain2html program -- the web browsers displaying your email
> > >in webmail apps should handle bi-di correctly as long as they understand
> > >UTF-8. Might the webmail backend be doing something wrong?
> >
> > I don't agree... web browsers are not supposed to be able to know how
> > to render bidi text. For this reason there are dir tags in
> > HTML. Webmail backends are also not doing it. This is not the same as
> > "understand UTF-8".
>
> I'm not too familiar with bi-di, and I can see that a dir tag does exist
> for HTML. We seem to agree that terminals (which have no HTML-like
> tags) are supposed to figure out how to render bi-di correctly. Looking
> around a bit I see that there are three standard ways to indicate
> direction changes:
>
> - Use Unicode control characters, most of which are discouraged, except
> for the right-to-left and left-to-right marks (which are for
> specifying direction for weak-directional characters relative to
> surrounding strong-directional characters);
>
> - Use HTML dir attribute or bdo element;
>
> - Use CSS rules ('direction' and 'bidi-override' props).
>
> The last two are for HTML docs only. The first one is the only one that
> works in all contexts, while markup solutions based on anything other
> than Unicode require tags/attributes to be defined.
>
> But there is a Unicode bi-di algorithm... From what I can tell,
> renderers that implement it should not require marks (except for
> weak-directional characters, as mentioned above).
>
> > >How would I know if the Hebrew text in your signature is displaying
> > >correctly? [...]
> >
> > The first Hebrew letter in my first name is "Ayn", which looks
> > schematically like this:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > In a correct appearance you should see it at the rightmost place on
> > the line that has my first name, Amit, in my signature... if it
> > follows the word Amit immediately after the blank space, the terminal
> > does not support bidi.
>
> Indeed, my terminal is not displaying those in right-to-left. I see
> that some applications do display properly (for example, the Bluefish
> editor does, but vim/gvim does not).
>
> Nico
> -- If you're using urxvt as your terminal window, I've created a Perl extension that will apply bidi rules to the text. Check it out: http://www.chipstips.com/?p=584 -- Sterling (Chip) Camden | sterl...@camdensoftware.com | 2048D/3A978E4F http://camdensoftware.com | http://chipstips.com | http://chipsquips.com
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