Re: [emacs-bidi] Points composition - status.

[Yair Friedman (Jerusalem)]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> Yair Friedman (Jerusalem) wrote:
> > 
>> > The composition isn't missing: it's there, but it just isn't displayed,
>> > because a character terminal doesn't support that.  This is how display is
>> > supposed to work on a tty: it displays the first character of a composition
>> > and ignores the rest.
>> 
>> Yes, but the user doesn't have any indication of the presence of those
>> composed characters, this is exactly the same situation that was with
>> silent EOL conversion.
>
> Sigh...  Not another Mule-is-source-of-all-evil argument, please!

No no no! *Mule good ... Foundation bad * :-)

>
> Anyway, your analogy is wrong: the EOL conversion was never silent, it
> always indicated the file's EOL format on the mode line, people just
> weren't looking.

Sorry for not expressing myself clearly.  The indication was very minor,
but it was fixed later (20.6?) now if the EOL is not "native" you'd
clearly see (UNIX) or (DOS) or (MAC) in the modeline - this is
outstanding, and it should be.

>> Emacs should clearly notify the user that there
>> are more "invisible" characters. A notice when reading the file (like
>> when invoking region-upcase), and some sort of mark in the mode-line
>> when the cursor is over a composed character is required.
>
> I think you contradict yourself: if the EOL type indication on the mode
> line is not good enough, then neither will be the mode-line indication
> about diacriticals.  And a one-time message isn't enough, either: people
> just don't pay attention.

I'd like to see something like (COMPOSITION) indicator when the cursor
is (before) the composed character.

>
> I don't see any good solutions except a special editing mode where
> diacriticals are displayed by simulating them with ASCII characters (and
> the composition is suppressed).  Users who want to see all the diacriticals
> on a tty will use that mode.  But by and large, it should be obvious to
> anyone that editing on a tty has disadvantages, including some parts of
> text that aren't displayed.

OK, but just *silently* omitting the characters isn't a good solution
either.  The omission is indeed the best solution, but Emacs should
clearly indicate it.

>  We have the same situation today with inline
> images.
>

Inline images aren't working in my emacs installations. but I'd expect
some indication of the "missing" image like lynx does.