--- Olivier Chapuis wrote: > > Ok, I will try to start. At least I will try to find out which > is the "canonical charset" used by a given font (this is needed > by iconv). But in fact it seems to me that it is difficult to > determine when the fribidi filter should be applied to a string. > Let us say that we use the capCTL encoding for the discussion > (caps string are right to left, so fribidi reverse caps string). > In a menu if the visual label should be ABCDE, if the user > enter the line > addtomenu foo "EDCBA" exec exec xyz > in the config file, fribidi filter should be applied. But if the > user use a bidi editor (or enforce it) it will type: > addtomenu foo "ABCDE" exec exec xyz > and no fribidi conversion should be applied.
Keep in mind that there are two orders here - logical (ie. what's stored on disk) and visual (ie. what is/should be displayed). A unicode aware editor with Bidi will indeed display things correctly, the storage though will amount to it being stored in latin order (ie. its stored in the order a user types; "type-order" if you will). To follow your example above, the user should not reverse-enter anything (that's what Bidi ought to do for him/her); in other words, unless the person is whacked-out and doesn't know that Fvwm has Bidi support he should not bend backwards in an attempt to simply display his/her glyphs (in short, example 2 above should not be something you should worry about). When the person types his title in a bidi editor, the characters will still be stored in logical order (having Bidi support simply means you have visual support, there is no funny business taking place on disk -- there is no storage manipulation). > There is a similar problem with window title: for a RTL encoding > in which direction bidi application will set the WM_NAME? IMHO > the application should give the name in the good direction and so > fribidi is not needed. Similar problems arise when the user gives > the window title name with via command line. > > So it seems to me that fribidi is useful only if the locale > charest is UTF-8 (or when the user specify an iso10646-1/UTF-8 > font) as there is clear specification for bidi UTF-8 string. > > Nadim, any opinion? As you ask for bidi support in fvwm can > you explain in some details where are the problem with fvwm > for a user which needs bidi. >From what I understand, having Bidi enabled at all times should/will not alter current display of latin characters. In other words, let's assume you've setup fvwm to display menu/title/pager/etc with English/French characters, if you then opt to enable Bidi (in this instance the fribidi library), then all your fribidi output will amount to be exactly the same as the input - ie. you will not see a change. If, on the other hand, you had a title string "english, french, ARABIC" then you make a call to fribidi, it will return "english, french, CIBARA" (reversing the Arabic - which is what you'd want). I don't see why the locale is relevant - I can type-in my menu titles and xterm titles in .fvwmrc using a bidi editor and invoke fvwm irrespective of locale and should be able to see correct rendering of the titles, reversed and everything (like they where when I entered them in the Bidi editor). If I missed any parts or if its still confusing, doesn't hesitate to let me know. - Nadim __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - sign up for Fantasy Baseball http://sports.yahoo.com -- Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL:http://www.fvwm.org/>. To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm-workers" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To report problems, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
