On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 07:15:49PM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> Hi
>
> http://iglu.org.il/cgi-bin/fom?file=86 has been updated regarding
> keyboard configuration. I also put there more information about the
> avilable extended variants of the Israeli layout in XFree 4.3 .
One topic has not yet surfaced in this thread, so I'll raise it
explicitly:
parens mirroring: good? bad? ugly?
A bit about parens mirroring:
In unicode bidi algorithm the 4 paren pairs ()[]{}<> can be mirrored.
This is because the mark on the text is an opening/closing paren rather
than a right/left paren. When an opening paren is part of right-to-left
text it needs to be shows as a right paren, and when it is part of a
left-to-right lext it needs to be shown as a left paren. This reversing
is done as part of the bidi rendering by the different toolkits
(currently: qt, fribidi/pango/gtk, ICU/mozilla and ICU/OOo)
So far so good, and most people agree that this is a GoodThing (or at
least : the least bad). But there is one slight problem with this nice
abstraction: on the keyboard we have painted a left paren (shift-9) and
right-paren (shift-0).
This simplest approach says: "so what? The user is ought to be smart
enough to know that the picture of the left paren really stands for an
opening paren, and the picture of the right paren really stands for a
closing paren". In short: no need to do anything regarding user input.
Problem: users don't seem to be smart enough.
A second approach claims that the software should detect the user's
input and if the user in in right-to-left mode translate the parens
reversed. Currently this is only implemented by QT (>= 3.1).
Problem: this requires that the toolkit be aware of the user's input.
Furthermore, it seems that this needs to be implemented at the toolkit
level, and thus needs 4 different implementations.
So here comes a smart suggestion: You can probably say that a user types
right-to-left when He uses a keyboard layout of a right-to-left
language. So why not simply change the layouts of those languages to
have this mirroring built-in? As of XFree 4.3 this is the situation for
all RTL languages layouts (il, ar, ir, syr).
Atvantage: no change needed in any program. This even affects
non-bidi-aware programs
Problem: This change is done in a rather low level. The assumption that
RTL keyboard layout == writing RTL text is usually correct, but working
at the toolkit level canproduce better results.
--
Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend|
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+
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