[emacs-bidi] logical Hebrew for emacs

[Uwe Brauer]

Hi

I just saw your posting concerning writing logical Hebrew
with emacs. I think I tried all packages available and in my
opinion the situation is as follows:

If you really want to write logical Hebrew with latex, and
I recommend to use LyX for simple documents. However since
it does not support all the latex packages, and it is not
thought for writing source you should go for a logical
implementation of Hebrew in emacs.

Here are the possibilities:
1. The mule patch for GNU emacs-19.34. I put it more than a
   year ago on the IVRIX server. It allows you to write logical
   Hebrew, correctly displayed and saved as iso-8859-8. It has
   however the following BUGS:
   a. isearch does not work: you must use then something
      like word-search-forward
   b. The coding seems broken, therefore ispell does not
      work
   c. And you cannot send email using one of the built in
      mailer agents like VM gnus rmail etc.
2. There is a pre alpha mule patch for emacs-20-4.9: ispell
   and isearch works there but the cursor movement is not
   visual, so if you have text like:
  this is English \R{NOW COMES HEBREW} then the cursor
  inside the brackets will change direction.

3. If you want a visual mode, then you have as already
   mentioned the problem of reversing the order of the
   Hebrew text ignoring the ASCII text in the file. I have
   also some code written by Stephen Turnbull which works in
   Xemacs. I will send you this code separately. Of all the
   visual mode, hebeng of Ehud is the best, however it has
   two inconveniences, at least last time (march 2001) I tried
   it,
   -- pls   correct my if I am wrong Ehud--:
   a. It does not work properly with xemacs-20.4,
      xemacs-21.14 no mule (uni byte).
   B. If you type lines of Hebrew text, close emacs reopen
      the file and want to insert some new text in the old
      one, then line break does not work correctly, the text
      at the line end (in Hebrew display)
      gets either overwritten or deleted.


I strongly recommend your to give emacs-19.34  a try. You
will need the patch for lib6. Since there was no demand I
never put it on the IVRIX server. Please let me know your
decision, I think it is small enough even to be sent by
email.

Regards 

Uwe Brauer