Emacs & Hebrew

[Amit Aronovitch]

2009/2/20 Dov Grobgeld <dov.grobgeld at gmail.com>

> 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.
>

I doubt that we can find serious funding for this issue - emacs is not very
fashionable these days and I don't know of any local organization that uses
it regularly as a major platform (although you can find Emacsers scattered
practically everywhere).
However, maybe we can try setting up a bounty, through Hamakor, or maybe
even through FSF.

Having said that, I am certainly interested in this issue. I use emacs for
daily work, but switch to gedit whenever there's Hebrew involved - not very
convenient (but managable since work is in English)...
If someone else starts working on this, I'll follow closely and maybe give a
hand (if I find time).

    Amit
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20090221/5f267ab7/attachment.html>