Again, thanks for responding. You say "Being a software localizer myself I use bidi control characters all the time, and have explained them to many localizer over the years and they seem to grasp the concept quickly and appreciate it.", so I have to wonder whether your perspective may result from dealing with users who are more sophisticated or technologically astute than those I encounter.
Those users I encounter are extremely unlikely to know or care what the terms globalization, internationalization, localization or any of the other acronyms formed of digits surrounded by two letters mean. Explaining how to enter © or ™ symbols is often a challenge. Don't misunderstand me: These are not stupid people by any means and their expertise in their own areas is sometimes astounding, as is the number of languages many of them can read and write fluently. (I left out "read" deliberately, since many specialize in dead languages.) But they have no more interest in methods for entering 0x200b characters than they do in how to change the oil in their cars, swap out a hard drive or update their operating system. They don't feel they should *need* to know anything at all about what goes on "under the hood." I rather suspect that the "average" user is closer to those folks I deal with. The jumping cursor is entertaining to me mostly BECAUSE I know why it's doing so but still recognize how it can mystify those (the users I see anyway) who are just trying to get their words on paper. The reason I suspect it is not "bizarre or confusing" for you and others on the forum is simply because you and they understand what's happening and why. In the spirit of the subject, I'll refer to this phenomenon by the acronym "c7n." Your points about the benefits of explicit versus implicit control are certainly true but, again, I suspect that the former may only be true for that class of typists sometimes called "power users." I'm also uncertain how often heuristics would be wrong but, again, that likely has something to do with both the knowledge of the user as well as the subject matter. I would love to offer a "concrete suggestion on how to improve the situation" but I can only speak to my own use case (and those I've run into with others), and I can only say that - to be useful - such a suggestion would have to be predicated on some concrete objective that could be considered "universal" or at least "semi-universal." I have no idea what that might be, although I suspect it might end up being something like "make free intermingling of bidi text as transparent as possible; possibly setting defaults aimed at the lowest common denominator of user, while permitting more knowledgeable users much higher levels of control." I would liken this approach to how word wrapping (for example) is handled: it "just happens" with no thought or intervention for most users, but a "power user" can easily tweak it using techniques whose terms might mean absolutely nothing to many users. As I said earlier though; I'm delighted to see any attention at all paid to this subject; it reminds me of all the fracas back in the 1960s over standardizing on ASCII, which was going to solve pretty much all data interchange issues ever. Sigh. Thanks again for responding, but I'll leave improvement requests to someone with a thicker skin than I have. Regards -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Struggling-with-Hebrew-in-LO-tp4198211p4202408.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
