Reynolds-Gregg wrote: > What are the chances of getting support for right-to-left editing? Note > that this is not a request for bidi support. Support for the bidi > algorithm is not necessary for Arabic; all that is needed is glyph > shaping and right-to-left editing. Numbers can be wrapped in an xml > element and transformed to generate Unicode-compliant text. > > Your editor already almost supports Arabic text. It shapes the > characters correctly, and allows editing. The only problem is that the > cursor behavior is incorrect - it doesn't accurately indicate the > current point. This is the case for all the XML editors I've tried - > Oxygen, Morphon, and XMLBlueprint. The only remaining thing I need is > for the cursor to correctly show the insertion point. > > If you can implement right-to-left editing there is a least a chance > that I could generate some sales for you from my client. I love your > editor, but some kind of Arabic support is essential. Without that > support there is no possibility.
In order to give you an answer, we need to evaluate the exact amount of work to be done. Therefore we need to fully understand why you say ``Your editor already almost supports Arabic text''. We can easily understand why the caret behavior is incorrect: * We imagine that when you type a letter, the caret moves to the right, instead of moving to the left. * We imagine that when you click somewhere because you want to type text here, the caret is moved ``to the opposite side''. * Similar odd behavior with text selection (i.e. you drag the mouse over text). What we don't see is: * What version of MacOSX are you using? * What locale are you using? * What keyboard are you using? In a nutshell, what do we need to do to type Arabic on our Mac, just like you do? * Do you write pure Arabic documents? Don't you need to also type an English word from time to time? * How can Java *shape* letters correctly? We have done *nothing at all* to help Java at this. Unlike Morphon for example, XXE does not use the standard javax.swing.text.* classes. And we don't even support input methods. This is a real mystery... --- PS: Yours truly can speak, read and write Arabic (I'm Egyptian).
