> Surely those voices didn't mean paragraph-level support without
> also sentence- and word-level support. When you cite from a
> different language, the citation is obviously not always
> going to be a separate paragraph.
As it happens, sub-paragraph-level support is markedly more
difficult than paragraph-level support, so don't hold your
breath.
It's similar to the old discussion (i.e. flame war) of why the
ERT mode is not collapsable: The reason is that character-level
(technically equivalent to sentence-level) support is much more
difficult than paragraph-level.
One reason is that paragraph-level requires only 1D formatting
(because a paragraph spans the entire width of the screen), while
character-level requires 2D formatting.
Having said that, the old development branch actually had some
support of character-level collapsable insets implemented at
a developers meeting in Mexico by Juergen and Alejandro, so it
*is* possible to achieve.
This extrapolates to character-level RTL support: Of course it is
possible, but it's very complicated. How should lines wrap?
What about nested quotes: An English document with quote in Hebrew,
which itself contains an English quote.
What about search/replace? What about cut/paste?
There are many issues to consider.
Fortunately, most of them have been addressed by the Unicode standard,
but it still is a lot of work to understand and implement. I have the
Unicode book with part of the recipe, so if anybody have technical
questions, please let me know and I'll see what I can find out.
Greets,
Asger
