Emacs & Hebrew

[Dov Grobgeld]

I agree that I don't believe chances are big of finding funding. And even if
there was funding I think there are more urgent BiDi issues like fixing bugs
in OpenOffice, Gtk, or KDE.

So unless I sit at home rolling my thumbs for too long, I'm afraid that I
won't have time looking into it.

Regards,
Dov

2009/2/21 Amit Aronovitch <aronovitch at gmail.com>

> 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
>
>
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