Hello Jonathan,
I think I begin to understand what you are trying to accomplish. It is
indeed difficult to precisely select a text segment when there are
several spans of different directionality properties (LTR/RTL,
strong/weak, overrides, etc.) at its borders.
There are several possibilities for improving the selection GUI
look&feel in this case:
1. Turn off BiDi ordering for the entire file (useful by itself for
blind computer users; not directly related to our problem).
2. Manually turn off BiDi ordering for a text segment (say, a paragraph)
and then manually turn it back on.
3. Use the metaphor of using one hand to straighten out a piece of paper
when writing using the second hand (or straightening a piece of cloth
while doing needlework): turn off BiDi ordering 5 glyphs before and 5
glyphs after the mouse position (as the mouse moves, we suppress
ordering of differing glyphs). Have them displayed with background
having different color.
(The exact numbers are to be determined by usability tests, and be
user-configurable through a setup menu. So is the background color to
be used in this case.)
4. Have a small pop-up window, which displays the text around the mouse
without BiDi ordering and let the user guide his mouse actions using the
pop-up display. The regular text display would be unchanged.
It would be nice to get Arabic speakers to be involved in this, as
Arabic presents a special problem - probably unreadable when the order
of glyphs is reversed without additional processing. Hebrew and Latin,
in contrast, are still somewhat readable even in reverse direction.
--- Omer
On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 09:36 +0200, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
>
> > Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:23:32 +0200
> > From: Omer Zak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: linux-il <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
> > Subject: Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection
> >
> >> From the discussion below, I understand that Shachar and me use the same
> > definition of "visual selection". You drag the mouse from column X to
> > column Y in the same row of the display, and get whatever text which
> > happens to be displayed between those columns (the text could have been
> > from different spans of the corresponding original text - "logical
> > text").
>
> We agree on the meaning of visual selection.
>
> >
> > Jonathan, can you clarify if you mean the same thing, or whether you
> > really meant "temporarily turn off BiDi ordering for a selected text
> > segment and display it"?
>
> No, we mean temporaroly turn off bidi re-ordering for a text, do a logical
> selection (which is now the same as visual selection) of some subset and
> then revert the display of the whole text back to bidi ordering. Selected
> text wold be always be displayed in the same ordering as the unselected
> text.
>
> - yba
>
>
> >
> > --- Omer
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 09:09 +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> >> Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
> >>> Right, that's what the qualifier "in effect" means.
> >>>
> >> Visual selection, to me, means "selecting text from a continuous block
> >> of visually ordered text". If the text is not visually ordered then the
> >> selection cannot be considered "visual". I conceded that definitions may
> >> vary.
> >>
> >> I agree with Omer that visual selection does not seem all that useful to
> >> me. I am at a loss to think of what use to the end user a selection
> >> containing the end of the Hebrew part of a sentence followed by the end
> >> of the English part of the sentence is going to be. Same goes for the
> >> beginnings of the sentences combined.
--
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