A preliminary analysis of the ECMA bidi specs, TR-053, reveals that bidi is a function of a character imaging device.
[quote] Applications that are designed to handle bi-directional data streams can fully control the functionality of a bidirectional device. Such applications are called "bi-directionality-aware" applications. On the other hand, there is a need to allow applications not designed to handle bi-directional data streams to function reasonably well in a bi-directional environment, making this environment "transparent" to the application. Such applications are called "bi-directionality-unaware" applications. [/quote] The X server is a character imaging device, and VT102 (the original dumb terminal) is one too. It appears that the X server should provide bidi funcationality to character streams emanating from bi-di-unaware applications while Xterm (as a VT emulator) should be a bidi-aware application that sends out (optionally) bidi-compliant stream to the X server. Sun Microsystems (thanks) has made the complex text layout (CTL) engine and input method engine code freely available - under the contrib section at X.org - but due to licensing problems with Open/X, have not made the CTL (complex text layout) hooks public. It appears from the accompanying text document that they plan to do so. Runtime CTL is available for licensing from Open/X at $1000 a pop and is included in some versions of Solaris. If someone from Sun can provide the right guidance, and some of us can contribute the time, we can build the layout engine hooks and expedite this matter. -- Akber Choudhry Dyanet Inc. http://www.dyanet.com/ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
