Re: emacs-bidi for MS Windows?

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>
> On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, TAKAHASHI Naoto wrote:
>
> > > My main and important questions is: should Emacs-bidi compile with
> > > Mingw and work on MS Windows?
> >
> > No idea.It has been tested only with the X Window System.
>
> One problem with the Windows port of Emacs is that some of the Windows
> output routines do logical-to-visual reordering internally.Try
> displaying etc/HELLO on Windows in an unpatched Emacs 21.x and look at
> the Hebrew greeting: it will be displayed correctly in visual order,
> right to left, even though Emacs sent the logical-order string to the
> display!Now move point with C-f across the Hebrew greeting, and you
> will see it displayed in the logical order(!).
>
> So I expect some problems with bidi Emacs on Windows.The
> Windows-specific display code should somehow disable the automatic
> reordering performed by the Windows runtime.

For the record, Mozilla implements bidi support on many platforms,
in some cases having to work-around broken windows bidi support.
So its code can theoretically serve as a refernce for that point. I'm not
sure if anybody has written any documentation on that specific point,
however.

Anyway, this should be a starting point if someone *really* wants to
tackle this issue.

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