Re: basic-hebrew RtL-space ?

[John Cowan]

Doug Ewell scripsit:

> I've never understood why writing Hebrew or Arabic left-to-right is
> called "visual" order anyway.  These are RTL scripts; they are supposed
> to be not only written, but also read, right-to-left.  Wouldn't a reader
> of Hebrew or Arabic consider RTL to BE the "visual" order?

Of course.  It's sheer ethnocentricism.

-- 
Values of beeta will give rise to dom!  John Cowan
(5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you triedhttp://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to rename '.' or '..' entries; see  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html)

Re: basic-hebrew RtL-space ? Combinable accents and vowels needed.

[kefas]

RtL-characters are a major break-through in Unicode!
Please see inserted remarks to your comments!

On Monday 01 November 2004 10:16 pm, you wrote:
> From: "kefas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > Inserting unicode/basic-hebrew reults in a
> > convinient RtL, right-to-left, advance of the
> > cursor, but the space-character jumps to the far
> > right.  Is there a RtL-space?
> > In MS-Word and OpenOffice I can only change whole
> > paragraphs to RtL-entry.  But quoting just  a few
> > words in hebrew WITHIN a paragraph would be
> > helpful to many.
>
> And this is what the embedding controls are made
> for: - surround an RTL subtext (Hebrew, Arabic...)
> within LTR paragraphs (Latin...) with a RLE/PDF
> pair.
> - souround an LTR subtext (Latin, ...) within RTL
> paragraphs (Hebrew, ...) with a LRE/PDF pair.
>
> There's no need of a separate RTL space, given that
> the regular ASCII SPACE (U+0020) character is used
> within all RTL texts as the standard default word
> separator, and it inherits it has a weak
> directionality, that does not force a direction
> break, but that his inherited from the surrounding
> text.
My view:  The RtL and LtR -paragraph markers would not 
be needed any more, since at least the basic Hebrew 
characters are inserted and the cursor advanced to the 
left (no matter what paragraph). The SPace is 
bi-directional and in a LtR-paragraph after an 
RtL-word has been typed jumps to the far right 
(assuming that the next insert will be LtR), this is 
an irritation to me. Entering an R-letter it jumps 
back to the left of the R-word.  A RtL-SPace would 
remouve this irritation.
With my keyboar-layout I can type Latin text, press 
CAPSlock, write a few RtL-words and continue after 
CAPSunlock with L-text. I don't need to let go of the 
keyboard to touch the mouse, change 
paragraph-settings, fonts etc. any more (I considered 
these a big waste of time 'till now).
Also I tried it in WordPad and it works the same there.
I consider the R-letters in the Unicode a major 
advance, and just need an extra R-space.

Alternatively I would like the CAPSlock to change the 
default to RtL and the CAPSunlock back to LtR but 
without throwing the R-text to the other end of the 
paragraph (which it occasionally does when clicking on 
the LtR-paragraph sign.



More on Hebrew:
 
Meteg,Ethnachta and most accents need to be combinable 
with vowel-points in arbitrary order (Meteg sometimes 
right of the vowel). 

You can't at present even copy the first Word of the 
Hebrew biible, b:resheeth , (typing B+ dagesh. + shva: 
works nieetly, why not the also the other way around? 
they are on different parts: under and in the 
conconant) 
without running into this problem. The 1st sentence 
contains several more examples. 


>
> A good question however is whever the space should
> inherit its direction from the previous ctext or the
> next one.
> - If the previous text has a strong directionality,
> then the space should inherit its direction. This
> should be the case everytime you are entering text
> with a space at end: it's very disturbing to see
> this new space shift on the opposite side, when
> entering some space-sparated hebrew words within a
> Latin text, because the editor assumes that no more
> Hebrew will be added on the same line (this causes
> surprizing editing errors, for example when creating
> a translation resource file where translated
> resources are prefixed by an ASCII key, for example
> when editing a .po file for GNU programs using
> gettext()).
> - If the previous text in the same paragraph has no
> directionality, then it inherits its direction from
> the text after it (if it has a strong
> directionality);
> - if this does not work then a global context for
> the whole text should be used, or alternatively the
> directionality of the end of the previous paragraph
> (this influences where the cursor would go to align
> such weakly-directed paragraph with the previous
> paragraph, including the default start margin
> position.)
>
> The regular Bidi algorithm should be used to render
> a complete text, but strict Bidi rules should not be
> obeyed everytime when composing a text, where the
> current cursor position should act as a sentence
> break with a strong inherited directionality: the
> text can then be redirected at this position when
> the cursor moves to other parts of the text.
>
> I don't think this is an issue of renderers but of
> editors (notably in Notepad, where you won't know
> exactly where to enter a space during edition,
> unless you use the contextual menu that allows
> switching the global default directionality, and
> swap the alignment to the side margins; sometimes,
> when you want to know where there are REL/RLE and
> PDF Bidi controls, it's nearly impossible to
> determine it vizually in Notepad, unless you use an
> external tool such as native2ascii, from the Java
> SDK, to change the encoding with clearly visible
> marks). It's unfortunate, given that Notepad (since
>

Re: basic-hebrew RtL-space ?

[kefas]

See inserted remarks.
On Sunday 31 October 2004 05:05 am, you wrote:

> If you're going to quote an rtl phrase in an ltr
> context, you want to use an embedding. In plaintext,
> this would mean putting an RLE (U+202B) character
> before the phrase and a PDF (U+202C)after it. 
That is easily done by assigning the U-codes to some 
keys on the keyboard, but I dont know how to combine 
this with the pressing and releasing of CAPS.
MSKBLC.exe , keyboard-layout-creator, does not allow 
for that.
Is what I describe as desirable the visual input 
method? After reading about it I was not clearer.
Why don't we leave it to the text2html software to 
enclose a group of R-letters into RLE,PDF as you 
suggest.   
Changing languages during typing should be my own 
concern.
> ~fantasai

not font designers?

[E. Keown]

Elaine Keown
Seattle

Hi,

Supposedly this list has >600 people.  

Just of curiosity, how many of you are NOT font
designers?  

And are any of your corpus linguists, text database
people, or maybe database designers?  

Thanks, Elaine



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Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. 
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Public Review Issues update

[Rick McGowan]

The Unicode Technical Committee has posted a new issue for public
review and comment. Details are on the following web page:

http://www.unicode.org/review/

Review periods for the new item closes on November 8, 2004.

Please see the page for links to discussion and relevant documents.
Briefly, the new issue is:



55  Proposed Change to Character Properties for Two Katakana Characters

The UTC has received to change the General Category of two characters.  
Reports indicate that they should not have the General Category "Connector  
Punctuation" (gc=Pc) because the characters don't connect other elements,  
they separate elements. The two characters are:
 U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT
 U+FF65 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT
The proposal is to change the General Category of those characters from  
"Pc" (Connector Punctuation) to "Po" (Other Punctuation).



If you have comments for official UTC consideration, please post them by
submitting your comments through our feedback & reporting page:

http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html

If you wish to discuss issues on the Unicode mail list, then please
use the following link to subscribe (if necessary). Please be aware
that discussion comments on the Unicode mail list are not automatically
recorded as input to the UTC. You must use the reporting link above
to generate comments for UTC consideration.

http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html

Regards,
Rick McGowan
Unicode, Inc.

Re: not font designers?

[Mark E. Shoulson]

I'm trying to be a font designer, but I wouldn't say that's my 
profession (nobody's ever paid me for a font, though I'm hoping to 
change that within the next few weeks).  I guess I occasionally design 
fonts, but I'm a computer programmer/researcher/unlicensed brain 
mainly.  I've used and designed text databases, I've done linguistics... 
I'm also a pretty good cook and can fold my tongue into a W.

Labels are just that, and generally as helpful in understanding people 
as the ones on their clothes (I think I'm wearing a Lands' End shirt; 
does that change things?)  Even most type-designers aren't 
type-designers.  There's a lot more to typography and typesetting than 
drawing letters.

~mark
E. Keown wrote:
   Elaine Keown
   Seattle
Hi,
Supposedly this list has >600 people.  

Just of curiosity, how many of you are NOT font
designers?  

And are any of your corpus linguists, text database
people, or maybe database designers?  
 

Looking for the UDHR in Thai

[Eric Muller]

I am using the various versions of the Universal Declaration of Human 
Rights at  as test material. 
Unfortunately, the Thai version is an image, and the resolution is not 
good enough for me to even attempt to retype the document. Can somebody 
point me to either better images, or even better to a text version (any 
encoding, with or without markup)?

The only thing I have found so far is 
, but this does not seem 
to be the complete text: the preamble is missing, is the text is much, 
much smaller than any of the other languages.

Thanks,
Eric.

Re: not font designers?

[John Cowan]

Elaine Keown scripsit:

> >Just of curiosity, how many of you are NOT font
> >designers?  
> >
> >And are any of your corpus linguists, text database
> >people, or maybe database designers?  

FWIW, I am none of those things (I've designed a database now and then,
but I'm hardly a "database designer").

-- 
The Imperials are decadent, 300 pound   John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
free-range chickens (except they have   http://www.reutershealth.com
teeth, arms instead of wings, and   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
dinosaurlike tails).--Elyse Grasso

Re: not font designers?

[Doug Ewell]

E. Keown  wrote:

> Supposedly this list has >600 people.
>
> Just of curiosity, how many of you are NOT font
> designers?

I contributed about 200 or 250 glyphs to the bitmapped font built into
SC UniPad, but on no account does that make me a "font designer," much
less a real typographer.

> And are any of your corpus linguists, text database
> people, or maybe database designers?

I'm a software developer who periodically deals with
internationalization issues.  I've developed and maintained numerous
text databases.  I have a hobbyist's level of expertise in linguistics
and writing systems, and a decent understanding of coding issues.  I am
not a "linguist" or a "script expert."

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/