Emacs & Hebrew

[Omer Zak]

On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 19:05 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> You know, it is quite ironic that, having heard about a major Free
> Software project which now fully supports bidirectional scripts
> including Hebrew, the first thing people here ask is how to disable
> that feature.  Not whether it works, not if it's any good, not how
> well it supports this or that aspect of bidirectional editing -- but
> how to turn it off.  A sobering experience, I must say.

It is a question of control.

The problem is that Gedit implemented BiDi support without the option to
turn it off.

So when one wants to view BiDi text in visual order (the usual case),
one opens the file in Gedit.  And when one wants to see it in logical
order (e.g. to figure out how the visual order turned out to be so
messed up), one opened it in Emacs.

Another use case is by blind computer users, who prefer to use Braille.
All BiDi Braille text must be laid out in logical order.  So even if
your editor supports Hebrew Braille fonts, they are of no use if the
text is - too helpfully - printed out in visual order.

Few years ago, when Abiword people were debugging BiDi support, I asked
for an option to turn it off for the benefit of blind Hebrew computer
users.  This request was turned down.

--- Omer


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