Linux HTML mail agent with RTL and LTR paragraph explicit support

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 06/25/2012 11:22 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: Linux HTML mail agent with RTL and LTR paragraph explicit support":
>> I disagree completely. The embedding control characters are designed
>> for, well, embedding. What the standard[1] suggests, but does not
>> require, is the use of the first strong directional character in the
>> paragraph. The reasons this does not work for email are:
> I remember how 11 years ago, when I wrote "bidiv", a simple command-line
> tool to display Hebrew text files and emails (using the bidi algorithm
> from fribidi), I had exactly the problems you described. While the
> standard *does*, if I remember correctly, specify how the base direction
> of each paragraph is determined
I would use "recommends" rather than "specify".
>  no standard really specified what in a text file is a
> "paragraph".
And lucky for you that they don't. Even with the simple case of a plain
text file, a paragraph is defined differently depending on whether the
display is expected to do line wrapping or not. Had it said one thing,
in all likelihood, your implementation would be non-conforming.
> At the time, there was really no other tool
for linux
>  for displaying bidi plain
> text, so I hoped that this convention would be adopted by others.
> I don't know if it ever was - I'm still hoping it is, or will be.
> I certainly haven't seen a different convention. But my biggest fear
> is Shachar's claim that:
>
>>  4. The only standard way to provide paragraph directionality in email
>>     is by sending it as HTML
> I still believe that there's merit to plain text
I agree. There is a lot of merit to plain text. However, displaying BiDi
with plain text is difficult, and each implementation does it
differently. The problem is further compounded for pre-line broken text.

If you want your Hebrew email to appear as you have written it, you need
to send it in HTML.

Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com