Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
According to this knowledge base article, if a paragraph has natural writing direction, then the writing direction of the paragraph should change depending on the first character of the paragraph: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11211?viewlocale=en_USlocale=en_US The article gives an example where an English character begins a paragraph that consists primarily of Arabic text. I tried a similar experiment in TextEdit, and I'm not sure how to interpret the results. (I can't read any languages with RTL scripts, so I'm flying a bit blind here): 1. Locale is set to English - United States 2. English is the first item in the list of preferred languages in System Preferences 3. Enabled input methods are U.S. and Hebrew - QWERTY, with U.S. currently active 4. Open a new TextEdit document 5. Note that the current writing direction for both Paragraph and Selection are natural 6. Switch to the Hebrew - QWERTY input method 7. Type some gibberish The ruler has flipped to right-aligned, but the text, while running RTL, is laid out flush-left. Why? How is this useful? 8. Select the paragraph and change the paragraph's writing direction to RTL. Now the text is aligned flush-right. Why does an explicit RTL paragraph style behave differently than a natural paragraph whose first character is strongly RTL? --Kyle ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On 27/09/2013, at 5:12 AM, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: The ruler has flipped to right-aligned, but the text, while running RTL, is laid out flush-left. Why? Because paragraph alignment and text direction are orthogonal? How is this useful? No automatic rule is going to satisfy all cases, but I'd imagine most people who have asked for a paragraph to be aligned a particular way expect it to stay that way. -- Shane Stanley sstan...@myriad-com.com.au 'AppleScriptObjC Explored' www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/ ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013, at 03:57 PM, Shane Stanley wrote: On 27/09/2013, at 5:12 AM, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: The ruler has flipped to right-aligned, but the text, while running RTL, is laid out flush-left. Why? Because paragraph alignment and text direction are orthogonal? But it means the tabstops on the ruler have no relation to where the text is laid out on screen. And it doesn't explain why explicitly setting the paragraph to RTL causes text to align flush-right. According to my understanding of the docs, the text should behave identically whether the paragraph is explicitly RTL or if its first character is a hard-RTL character. --Kyle Sluder ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On 27/09/2013, at 9:00 AM, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: ut it means the tabstops on the ruler have no relation to where the text is laid out on screen. it's a compromise to a difficult situation. And it doesn't explain why explicitly setting the paragraph to RTL causes text to align flush-right. Setting the *paragraph* is setting the alignment. According to my understanding of the docs, the text should behave identically whether the paragraph is explicitly RTL or if its first character is a hard-RTL character. The text and the paragraph are different things. -- Shane Stanley sstan...@myriad-com.com.au 'AppleScriptObjC Explored' www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/ ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
The ruler has flipped to right-aligned, but the text, while running RTL, is laid out flush-left. Why? Because paragraph alignment and text direction are orthogonal? But it means the tabstops on the ruler have no relation to where the text is laid out on screen. And it doesn't explain why explicitly setting the paragraph to RTL causes text to align flush-right. When you say you're changing the writing direction, do you mean programmatically via NSParagraphStyle or just testing in TextEdit? If it's the latter, then I'd guess TextEdit's menu action is also changing the text alignment as a convenience. ~Martin ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013, at 04:14 PM, Shane Stanley wrote: The text and the paragraph are different things. Allow me to be more specific. According to my understanding of the docs, NSTextView should lay out text identically in both of these situations: - Text in the range (0, textStorage.length) has a value of NSWritingDirectionNatural for the NSWritingDirectionAttributeName attribute, and a value of NSWritingDirectionRightToLeft for the baseWritingDirection property of the paragraph style in the NSParagraphStyleAttributeName. - Text in the range (0, textStorage.length) has a value of NSWritingDirectionNatural for both the NSWritingDirectionAttributeName attribute and for the baseWritingDirection property of the paragraph style, and the first character in the text storage is a hard-RTL character. I have not yet verified that the menu items in TextEdit are producing the exact circumstances I describe above, but it's certainly confusing to see a ruler that's right-aligned and text that's not. --Kyle Sluder ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
Likely natural is based on either the preferred language priority in system preferences or the region format settings there in text edit. Arguably, mixed RTL and LTR layout is non trivial and basically has no catch all correct state, and is generally going to be the case of the dominant one is LTR with some RTL (probably English) interspersed. Good news is LTR languages tend to not have a lot of RTL interspersed. It's probably best handled for page layout via separate layout boxes in a UI that are aligned by some typographic rules. NSTextView will suffer from having its original design based on basically European RTL word processors. It's a hard topic that pretty much requires special case development. Sent from my iPhone On 2013/09/27, at 4:12, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: According to this knowledge base article, if a paragraph has natural writing direction, then the writing direction of the paragraph should change depending on the first character of the paragraph: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11211?viewlocale=en_USlocale=en_US The article gives an example where an English character begins a paragraph that consists primarily of Arabic text. I tried a similar experiment in TextEdit, and I'm not sure how to interpret the results. (I can't read any languages with RTL scripts, so I'm flying a bit blind here): 1. Locale is set to English - United States 2. English is the first item in the list of preferred languages in System Preferences 3. Enabled input methods are U.S. and Hebrew - QWERTY, with U.S. currently active 4. Open a new TextEdit document 5. Note that the current writing direction for both Paragraph and Selection are natural 6. Switch to the Hebrew - QWERTY input method 7. Type some gibberish The ruler has flipped to right-aligned, but the text, while running RTL, is laid out flush-left. Why? How is this useful? 8. Select the paragraph and change the paragraph's writing direction to RTL. Now the text is aligned flush-right. Why does an explicit RTL paragraph style behave differently than a natural paragraph whose first character is strongly RTL? --Kyle ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On 27/09/2013, at 11:12 AM, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: - Text in the range (0, textStorage.length) has a value of NSWritingDirectionNatural for the NSWritingDirectionAttributeName attribute As I read the docs, NSWritingDirectionNatural is a type of NSTextAlignment, specified by NSText's -setAlignment: method. NSWritingDirectionAttributeName is a character-level attribute for overriding the default bidirectional behavior, and takes an array of numbers. So I'm not quite following. -- Shane Stanley sstan...@myriad-com.com.au 'AppleScriptObjC Explored' www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/ ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On Sep 26, 2013, at 7:00 PM, Shane Stanley sstan...@myriad-com.com.au wrote: On 27/09/2013, at 11:12 AM, Kyle Sluder k...@ksluder.com wrote: - Text in the range (0, textStorage.length) has a value of NSWritingDirectionNatural for the NSWritingDirectionAttributeName attribute As I read the docs, NSWritingDirectionNatural is a type of NSTextAlignment, No, it's not. It specifically refers to the writing direction, NOT the text alignment. Values in this enum are valid for NSParagraphStyle.baseWritingDirection right out of the bag, and when combined with NSTextWritingDirectionOverride or NSTextWritingDirectionEmbedded can be used with the NSWritingDirectionAttributeName key. See the OS X 10.6 AppKit release notes for further clarification. --Kyle Sluder ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: Confusion about NSWritingDirectionNatural
On 2013 Sep 26, at 21:02, dangerwillrobinsondan...@gmail.com wrote: Good news is LTR languages tend to not have a lot of RTL interspersed. It's somewhat common for authors in certain fields to have to mix, e.g. German, Italian, Greek and Hebrew, or Hebrew, ProtoPhoenician, and Arabic in the same page, with individual words or phrases of a different language from the primary one embedded within sentences or as parentheticals. I'm tired and fuzzy at the moment about some of the mixed directionalities of other language combinations I've had customers (or relatives) asking about (e.g. English+Japanese, Gujarati + English + ?). Ludwig von Mises _Human Action_, an economics book; and a pre-publication manuscript for a book on Isaac Luria (with hundreds of multi-lingual, multiple attributes, etc., foot-notes associated with the first 2 pages) come to mind. Anywhere, there are people who need this stuff to work correctly. ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
