Re: [emacs-bidi] Bidirectional editing in Emacs -- main design decisions

[mhsekhavat]

Eli Zaretskii wrote

What is the real-life use case that requires this? What kind of text are we talking about?

The two use cases are:

1) Manipulating serialized file formats such as:

* A yaml file can have a list of strings each of which may be left-to-right or right-to-left. such as:
full_names:
    - Carolyn Simon
    - Elijah	Moreno
    - An Arabic Full Name Which Should Be Displayed right-to-left
date : 2001-01-23
* A SubRip subtitle file such as:
1
00:20:41,150 --> 00:20:45,109
- English speaker: what is your name?
- < An Arabic name which should be displayed right-to-left >

2
00:21:41,150 --> 00:22:45,109
- Nice to meet you

2) When writing a LaTeX text, you can split a paragraph into many lines. For example, if you want to write A Latin paragraph with an Arabic sentence in it , it is very common to write the Arabic sentence in a separated line:

This is an Latin paragraph with some 
\begin{Arabic}
بسم الله الرحمن الرحیم
\end{Arabic}
that is added.
This will be rendered in a simple paragraph by LaTeX, and most editors like gedit, TexStudio, TexMaker,... display it correctly (all lines LTR direction but Arabic line in RTL direction). But emacs does not display the Arabic sentence in correct direction.

Note that in many use cases it is either semantically wrong to add a blank line or the file is created in other editors without this issue.

I think these two sample use cases, at least, are very common and I know many RTL-users who have this issue with emacs and switch to other editors like gedit when they want to work with RTL files. This behavior is only in emacs and most editors consider different base directions for each line.

As I have previously mentioned, this behavior is a nice feature for emacs when editing regular text files, But I think it is necessary to be able to turn it off when manipulating a file format in which this feature is more like a bug, and inconsistency with most other standard editors.

Thanks,
Mohammad Hossein Sekhavat

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