Re: [I18n]Re: mlterm with BiDi support
Hi,
What do you call a two month delay? late?
On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> At Thu, 27 Dec 2001 05:28:34 +0200,
> Shaul Karl wrote:
> > Behdad wrote:
> > > What we have found is to enable the bidi on terminal, ask applications
> > > that support bidi, to send a bidi-off escape code to terminal, and do
> > > the stuff themselves, for example, libncurses, should support bidi and
> > > turn the terminal bidi off on initscr()...
> >
> > Can you explain what do you mean by `libncurses, should support bidi'?
> > Why not having the BiDi stuff centralized at one point (the terminal)
> > instead of having it spread across many (ncurses, slang, libraries for
> > text only processing)?
>
> I think Behdad says that they sometimes need to use non-BiDi-supported
> terminals such as Linux console. For such cases, libraries such as
> curses may supply BiDi support, though I don't know this works well
> or not.
No, this is not what I meant, consider the X equivalents: biditext
library currently adds bidi support in X server layer, it means that
applies bidi on all strings that get drawn on the screen, but what's
the result? With editors, browsers, ..., you need to refresh the
screen each time you type a letter, you get wrong order, ..., while
the output from grep works fine in your non-bidi terminal ...
What I mean is that:
1. When the editor keeps track of cursor, the terminal bidi can't
work, because the editor thinks different about the current data on
terminal, speaking in terms of emacs: the glyph matrix of the emacs is
different from what you see on terminal ('cause the terminal has
applied bidi on the output of emacs...).
2. Also libncurses should know bidi, why? answer: the bidi algorithm
of unicode is a paragraph oriented algorithm, but what does ncurses
with a paragraph? I guess it breaks it to lines, moves cursor to the
start of first line, prints it, ... second line, prints it, ..., then
tries to redraw the menu bar titles, then ...., you know, if you pass
this data to a paragraph oriented text filter, what you get is somehow
a random permutation of the input..., try running vim o lynx with bidi
enables xterm, and play with it to get the idea, while cat, and
friends work fine. The case is just like the X server bidi support,
vs. KDE and GNOME support, I guess every UI Toolkit should know about
bidi, because this is the toolkit that knows the logical boundry of
different pieces of text.
Yours,
behdad
> For my case, Linux console doesn't support Japanese. Thus, I have
> lines like:
>
> if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ] ; then
> LANG=C
> else
> LANG=ja_JP.eucJP
> fi
>
> in my ~/.bashrc file.
>
> ---
> 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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--
Behdad Esfahbod 19 Bahman 1380, 2002 Feb 8
<behdad at bamdad dot org> [Finger for Geek Code]
George Orwell was an optimist.
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