Re: Changes in latin-ltx.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dave Love <address@hidden>
> Date: 07 Dec 2001 17:04:33 +0000
> 
>  > Is there any particular reason why the latin-ltx.el was changed
>  > today to produce the Hebrew letters Aleph, Bet, Gimel, and Dalet,
>  > instead of the symbols by the same names (which have different
>  > Unicode codepoints)?
> 
> They were confusing, just as if \mu produced U+00b5.

Sorry, I don't follow: why is this confusing?  If the user has the
right font installed, then they will see a correct glyph, which looks
similar (or even identical) to the other character's glyph.  How can
an identical glyph be confusing?

I think it actually could be confusing the way it is now: someone who
uses a TeX-like input method will most probably type scientific text,
not Hebrew text.  That someone will not expect Hebrew characters in
their text instead of mathematical symbols.

>  > latin-ltx is not a Hebrew input method, so producing
>  > only 4 letters doesn't seem useful.
> 
> If more are useful, they could be added.

No, please don't!  The TeX-like strings that latin-ltx uses are
supposed to produce mathematical symbols, isn't that true?  If so,
it's simply _wrong_ to produce Hebrew letters instead, because in
Unicode, these are different characters.  For example, they have
different bidirectional properties, so when bidirectional display will
be supported, the mathematical expressions, in which these characters
will be used, will be messed up by the bidi reordering algorithm!
(That's why Unicode invented different character codes for something
that otherwise looks and smells exactly like their Hebrew namesakes,
in the first place.)

So I think we should revert that change.