Emacs & Hebrew

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: w1 at zak.co.il (Omer Zak)
> Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 22:57:06 +0300
> 
> 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.

If you use Emacs, you know that giving the user control is one of
Emacs's main design principles.

I respond to some of your points below, but my point was that the last
thing I expected from this community, during almost 3 years it took to
develop bidirectional display engine, was that the first reaction
would be "tell me how to turn it off".

> 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.

Suppose the visual order is never "messed up" in Emacs -- do you still
need this switch?

> 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.

I don't know enough about this, but isn't Hebrew Braille just an
encoding of Hebrew letters using Braille characters?  If so, then
Braille characters all have string left-to-right directionality, and
therefore will not be reordered for display by Emacs.

But even if the above does not solve the issue, I would expect people
to request that Emacs does TRT by default with Hebrew Braille, rather
than turning bidi off.

> 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.

Well, I hope you agree now that Emacs is not Abiword...