[emacs-bidi] Re: emacs-bidi Digest, Vol 16, Issue 1

[Alex Gretlein]

> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:11:25 +0200
> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Subject: [emacs-bidi] Summary of bidi branch?
> To: address@hidden
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> Hi,
>
> is there somewhere a summary of where the bidi branch stands nowadays?
> How synched is it to actual developments in which branch?
>
> I just got back from a conference where somebody doing critical
> editions of Arabic text said that pretty much the only usable editor
> (as in: renders characters correctly) for Unicode R-to-L was Unipad
> under Windows.

I wonder what standards he's expecting for rendering? Notepad,
Wordpad, OOo, MS Word, you name it, work fine under Windows (2000/XP)
for Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, as long as you've enabled  support system
wide. Urdu unicode fonts are universally not up to snuff, but that's
Urdu's problem, not solvable in unicode. For that matter WYSIWYG
editors in web pages in IE and Firefox also render all three languages
just fine.

Under Linux, Katoob is specifically designed for this, but Gedit,
Mousepad, maybe Yudit (it would be nice to have some English docs),
AbiWord, and I'm sure many others are perfectly capable of the task,
again provided system-wide support is enabled, and fonts installed.

I've prepared texts which move in and out of all three languages. I
end up using OpenOffice for this, even though I actually can't stand
OpenOffice for anything else. I would like to have something not X-
based (like functional bidi emacs - ahem,) but can't imagine what
problems this person is having preparing Arabic critical editions.
Forget a text editor or word processor, they have their choice of
entirely localized Arabic operating systems to work in. (Which can't
be said yet for Urdu, although it is true of Farsi.)