Dotan: I'm sorry I never stumbled across your essay before, but thanks for an excellent explanation of how the Unicode® Standard Annex #9/Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm works *in actual practice*!
So far as I can see, your description is still valid for even the recently updated version of that algorithm (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-35.html). As published, the Unicode Consortium's algorithm really doesn't explain what's happening in a way that would help an average user - one who is just trying to "type" while mixing multiple scripts with opposing directionality - it's more intended for developers. Unfortunately (in my view anyway), the algorithm itself makes some assumptions that I find unjustifiable. A primary example is the categorization of certain "shared characters" (spaces, punctuation and so forth) as neutral, and accompanying that with the idea that they should therefore take on the directionality of the paragraph unless and until surrounded by characters that clearly define them as one directionality or another. This seems to be why, for instance, the cursor jumps around mysteriously when entering a multi-word segment of Hebrew or Arabic scripts (regardless of the actual language they are used for) each time a space is encountered (you said "In LibreOffice you shouldn't have such an issue" - true enough, but several remain). It would seem to me that - from a user-interface perspective at least - such characters should keep the directionality of the most recently typed character, leaving the cursor where it was before the space (most common example, but occurs with other such characters) was entered. If the next character is indeed one of the opposite directionality, then make the correction accordingly. As a matter of principle, assumptions in algorithms always seem risky and/or dangerous. In this case, the whole idea that one needs to set the directionality of characters or phrases ahead of time seems particularly problematic. The obvious counter-argument to this is when beginning a paragraph with a character that isn't in the direction the writer intended, that would need to be treated as a special circumstance. The ultimate objective would seem to be completely removing any barriers to freely typing in whatever language or script desired without needing to know a lot of special tricks; both Unicode (and UTF-8) and OpenType font technology are big huge steps towards this goal - but we're not quite there yet. Again, thanks for pointing out your essay! -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Struggling-with-Hebrew-in-LO-tp4198211p4199184.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
