Emacs & Hebrew

[Dov Grobgeld]

There was a complex issue of emacs bidi that I tried to follow back in 2002.
The mailing list still up at:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-bidi/

What I remember from the discussion was that fribidi and the Unicode Bidi
algorithm were ruled out, because they were considered not to be
"sufficient" for the emacs bidi needs. The discussion eventually reached
such a technical complexity that I lost interest. In the end, appearently
nothing came out of the effort and the bidi changes never made it into the
trunk.

It is probably a good idea to restart and try to copy the Gtk or the Qt
behavior. Note that BiDi is a lot more than just the application of the
algorithm. You also need to take into account things such as:

   - Cursor movement.
   - Internal splitting of the visual and the logical positions.
   - Hit detection for mouse down.
   - The fact that a continous logical selection may be one, two, or three
   visual selections.
   - How to deal with zero width characters. (Is there a view-control-code
   mode in emacs?).

I'd be willing to do the work, if someone else would fund it. I'm leaving my
current employment in another few months, and I'm currently looking for
large and small jobs.

Regards,
Dov

2009/2/20 Yuval Hager <yuval at avramzon.net>

> On Friday 20 February 2009, Omer Zak wrote:
> > I thought about this about 1 1/2 years ago but did not get around to
> > implementing it.
> >
> > XEmacs has support for loading external modules, however I use emacs.
> >
>
> Me too.
>
> > In Emacs version 22, it is possible to use IPC to communicate with
> > another process.  Then one needs to write a module which invokes FriBidi
> > functions and have an emacs mode, which communicates with the module
> > when the buffer's contents need to be rendered.
> >
>
> I saw this: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs/poor-mans-bidi.el
>
> But I'd rather have a rich mans bidi.
>
> What about Mule? Can it be used with the standard Emacs?
>
> --y
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20090220/7b80a606/attachment.html>