Re: RTL support

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:05:43 -0600
>>From: Gregg Reynolds <[email protected]>
>>
...
> in the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm makes me wonder how come such
> an elaborate scheme (more complex than the scheme used in Hebrew) was
> invented if Arabic can be written without it.
> 
1.  It was legacy, so Unicode had so support it.  Then they went berserk 
with it.
2.  Whoever made that first fateful design mistake either didn't 
understand what he was doing, or else designing in the service of the 
Arabic/Hebrew/etc speaking community was not a priority (making Western 
software work for those languages cheaply was most likely the 
motivation, hence the desire to avoid handling LSD-first digits.  But 
that's just my speculation.)
> 
>>So how hard would it be to add plain RTL layout first, and then Arabic 
>>shaping?
> 
> 
> I have no idea.  I certainly am not going to work on RTL without bidi.
> If you want partial bidi support, you might try the m17n version or
> hebeng.el (which you could hack to support Arabic).
> 
> As for Arabic shaping, I think some work was or is planned in the
> Unicode branch.  You may wish to try searching the emacs-devel
> archives for suitable keywords, I think Kenichi Handa posted some
> messages there in the past.
> 

Thanks, I'll take a look.

-gregg