Re: [emacs-bidi] Bidi Emacs: R2L paragraphs and the direction of glyph_row

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Eli, Gregg,

On 2009/11/27 1:10, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:58:39 -0600
> > From: Gregg Reynolds<address@hidden>

> > It's also a major pain to edit XML in a bidi editor.  And I do mean
> > major.
>
> Again, an explicit list of main problems would be useful (although I
> deliberately decided not to handle bidirectional editing for meta
> documents yet, so this specific class of problems is still a long way
> from being dealt with).

This is a well-known problem. For some more background and some attempt 
at a solution, please see:

http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2005/pub/IUC28-bidi/ and
http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2008/pub/IUC32-bidi/

Unfortunately, the test prototype available at
http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2008/pub/IUC32-bidi/bidi-source.html
is not very usable currently because the carret jumps around and has to 
be repositioned. That problem has been solved, but I didn't get around 
to make the update publicly available. Anyway, both the simulation and 
the Web-based editor should make it possible to test your problem cases 
and tell us whether our solutions help (we know they aren't perfect; 
there is no such thing as perfect bidi, unfortunately).

Questions and comments are very welcome!

In a discussion with Ken'ichi Handa and Naoto Takahashi in 2005, they 
pointed out that using bidi marks in overlays should make it possible in 
bidi emacs to address this problem. Unfortunately, nobody here is 
familiar enough with emacs lisp to implement this, but I'd be very glad 
to help somebody with some emacs lisp skills to work on such a project.

Regards,    Martin.

--
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:address@hidden