Re: Emacs for Arabic

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

> Takahashi-san, first and foremost thank you again for your help and
> interest in Arabic and the various issues there-in.A couple of
> things;
>
> 1. I'm attaching a very simple patch against what's currently hanging
>  of the FTP site that makes some minor modifications and corrects
>  a couple of encodings - do please apply it.
>
> 2. Regarding the "simplified" Bidi, could I suggest the following
>  rather simple addition.  Pseudo-code would get the point across
>  simpler.
>
>    if ( first_char_is_RTL )
>      Assume entire line is Right-To-Left
>    else
>      /* default */
>      Assume entire line is Left-To-Right

Generally, it would be best to reorder paragraphs rather than lines.
Reordering lines wil give some strange results in case a line in the
middle of a paragraph happens to start with a character of the "other"
directionality (e.g: a number or english letter in the middle of a hebrew
paragraph).

Also note that you should generally scan the {line|paragraph|whatever} for
the first char that has strong "directionality".

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir