At 09:30 PM 4/22/02 +0200, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote: >Paul Rohr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in >[EMAIL PROTECTED]:">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: > >> How should selections work for combining characters? > >See chapter 5.12 of the Unicode book, available online at ><URL: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/ch05.pdf >.
Thanks for the excellent reference, Karl. My question remains, but now the possible answers can be far more precisely defined. Specifically: 1. Which level of consistent character boundaries Just Works? -------------------------------------------------------------- In the vocabulary of 5.12 here, the choices are: - Cluster Boundaries - Stacked Boundaries - Atomic Character Boundaries Since AbiWord is designed to allow easy entry, manipulation, and formatting of large quantities of text, I'd think we should rule out the third option. It might make re-entry of portions of a composed character easier, but it opens up a rat's nest of formatting issues in the UI. As for the other two, I'm not a native speaker of Devangari, but I'm willing to guess that cluster selection would be preferred behavior for them. For example, is it ever meaningful to make *part* of the "ka + vowel sign a" cluster bold? OK, now I'll duck while the native speakers set me straight. :-) 2. Which selection mode Just Works for bidi text? -------------------------------------------------- According to section 3.1.3 of one of Karl's other references: http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#sec-VisualRenderingUnits there are two possible selection modes for BiDi text: - logical selection mode - visual selection mode As one of the parties responsible for the selection code Tomas inherited, I'd guess he may have found it easier to implement the logical mode, but I wasn't paying enough attention when that got implemented. Is the other mode more desirable? If so, how bad would it be to encapsulate the necessary selection logic to allow discontiguous selections? Paul
