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Re: mlterm with BiDi support



Hello,

At Mon, 24 Dec 2001 18:50:19 +0200,
Shaul Karl wrote:

> I believe a terminal emulator is the natural place for BiDi handling. 
> Isn't one of the terminal emulator main tasks to free the application 
> from the
> tedious details of input/output and present a common interface? After 
> all, it is the terminal emulator and not the application who has more 
> knowledge about the terminal and the most convenient methods of dealing 
> with various aspects of the terminal. A terminal emulator that does not 
> handle its BiDi applications force these applications to deal with BiDi 
> by themselves.
> This is bad because:
> (1) It complicates the application with aspects that the application 
> should not be concerned of (input/output methods).
> (2) It also complicates the application because the application has 
> more limited ways to handle the terminal then the terminal emulator.
> (3) It does not help in creating a common application-terminal 
> interface for BiDi applications. Actually, not only that it does not 
> help but it also makes it more difficult. Even if the application 
> programmer is looking for BiDi support it is hard for him to verify the 
> correctness of his work since this is not natural for him.

Thank you for your clear opinion.  Though I fully agree the logic of
your opinion, I thought it was not sufficient.  I wanted to know how
_native_ speakers of Hebrew and Arab think.  (Sometimes logically
perfect opinion annoys native speakers because native speakers have
their own way to do and tradition, which may be somewhat irrational
but should be respected.)


> > The point is, Shaul, do you think the BiDi support should be enabled
> > by default or should be disabled by default?
>
> What are the implications of enabling it by default? 
> Will it be transparent to applications that are not BiDi aware? Will it 
> makes them totally unusable? Perhaps it would makes them show some 
> gibberish here and there but the overall result would be acceptable?

Enabling BiDi never make mlterm unusable for non-BiDi people.
I cannot feel even speed down because of BiDi.  I think there are
no reasons to disable BiDi.

FYI, there are some people who thinks BiDi should be supported not
by terminal emulators but by applications. 
      http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/luit/
      http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#xterm
However, they are not native speakers of RTL languages and I think
native speakers' opinion should be respected.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



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