The problem: typing spaces at RTL/LTR boundaries does not always do what the user expects/wants.
(The reason I opened a new bug, is that this really a different issue than what we have solved up until now (bug 3789): that was mainly about getting the GUI and backend to match. Now that they match, we can deal with the "real" issue. The only thing we have done for the "real issue" so far, is that in "normal typing" --- i.e., typing in the logical order --- the language of the space will be set correctly, regardless of whether or not the user switches languages before or after typing the space. We may decide, in the end, that that's not necessary, either...)
Note that there are two separate issues: 1) What the end result should look like (at the buffer / latex output level)2) How we achieve that result, at the same time making the user-experience as simple as possible
Note that (1) is totally unrelated to visual/logical movement --- there's no cursor at all in the end result. I'm quite sure that also (2) is orthogonal to the question of visual movement, but I'm not 100% sure...
Obviously, (2) can only be solved after (1), because we first need to know what we want to achieve. So I'm focusing on (1) for now:
There there are some subtleties to this issue which I'm not sure that everyone appreciates, and which make a solution to this not as trivial as some of you seem to think it should be.
The hard part is to make sure that we maintain logical correctness of the resulting text. Logical correctness is important, because if the text is *not* logically correct, then you get "hidden" problems: usually the text looks fine, so the user thinks there's no problem. Bit in certain situations, problems suddenly appear, but by then the user isn't aware of them and doesn't notice.
For example:I've been saying all along that the *correct* way is that spaces at RTL/LTR boundaries be in the language (direction, really) of the paragraph. Any other situation is logically incorrect. Attached is a lyx document demonstrating this. (Now is the time to look at the file, there are explanations about it inside it itself. For those of you who don't have hebrew in latex, I'm attaching the dvi, too).
I think this demonstrates the necessity of maintaining logical correctness. So now we have to see how we achieve (2). However, we have the following rule: any "magic" has to happen in the GUI; i.e., the LyX buffer should already represent a logically correct situation; i.e., when we generate the latex, we should not have to apply any bidi logic at all --- just make what has *already* been marked as RTL, as RTL, and what's LTR as LTR.
So now we can discuss how we go about (2). Hope this clarifies the situation... Dov
spaces_at_bidi_boundary.dvi
Description: TeX dvi file
spaces_at_bidi_boundary.lyx
Description: application/lyx
