Re: [emacs-bidi] state of BIDI within stable GNU emacs (UTF8) nikud

[Gregg Reynolds]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Uwe Brauer <address@hidden>
> > Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 18:28:52 +0100
> >
> > After a long time I have to use GNU emacs to write some hebrew text
> > (most likely including nikud). 
> >
> >    - I   am currently trying out  the  stable emacs 21.4 version
> >      (shipped with Debian  unstable). That  version has no   R2L
> >      support as far as I can see. Which version has, a snapshot
> >      version. 
>
>
> Sorry, there's still no support for bidi editing in any version of
> Emacs, not even in the CVS.

Sure there is!  Well, sort of.  Emacs correctly shapes Arabic *words* 
(including diacritics) RTL, but sentences run LTR.  Sometimes you have 
to C-l to get it to redraw the shapes.  It works surprisingly well for 
many browse/edit tasks; it's not that hard to get used to reading Arabic 
that way.  The advantage is of course that you can use all the standard 
Emacs functionality on Arabic text.  I dunno if it would work this way 
for Hebrew.

I use emacs (v 22.0.50.2, also one of the 21.3 versions) all the time 
for editing (not composing, except for short bits) Arabic plaintext.  I 
had to create an Arabic Quail package to get an Arabic keyboard layout, e.g.

(require 'quail)

(quail-define-package
 "arabic-ar-AR" "arabic-ar-AR" "aar<"
 t
 "arabic-ar character input method with Arabic keyboard layout

Doubling the postfix separates the letter and postfix: e.g. a'' -> a'
" nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules

        ("f" ?ب) ;; baa
        ("j" ?ت)  ;; taa
        ("e" ?ث) ;; thaa
        etc.
)

BTW, you know that Vim supports RTL?  But without bidi reordering.

Hope that helps,

gregg