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Alex Schroeder | 3 Aug 15:44
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merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

Hi all,

We've all been waiting for a bidi-capable Emacs for a year or longer,
now.  The existing emacs-bidi seems to work fine -- it just doesn't
modify the current display engine.  I recently even saw some Arabic
text in UTF-8 displayed correctly while using ERC (an IRC client for
Emacs) with emacs-bidi.

Instead of waiting further, I suggest we just take what we have.
It may be slow, cumbersome, still have tricky bugs in it -- but
having something is better than having nothing.

Whoever took the decision a long time ago to not use the approach
used in emacs-bidi should reconsider the decision.  We've been
waiting for a long time; I don't suppose that was foreseeable at the
time the decision was taken.  Given that we don't have any redisplay
hackers -- not to mention with enough free time -- I think the
current emacs-bidi approach is the best we will be able to come up
with in the year to come.  And I don't think we really want to wait
that long.  We'd rather take the imperfect solution.

Alex.
--

-- 
http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
I was on holidays from 2003-07-01 to 2003-07-29
and have a lot of catching up to do.
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Eli Zaretskii | 3 Aug 22:43
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

> From: Alex Schroeder <alex <at> emacswiki.org>
> Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 15:44:46 +0200
> 
> Whoever took the decision a long time ago to not use the approach
> used in emacs-bidi should reconsider the decision.  We've been
> waiting for a long time; I don't suppose that was foreseeable at the
> time the decision was taken.  Given that we don't have any redisplay
> hackers -- not to mention with enough free time -- I think the
> current emacs-bidi approach is the best we will be able to come up
> with in the year to come.  And I don't think we really want to wait
> that long.  We'd rather take the imperfect solution.

I'd rather ask on emacs-devel for volunteers to carry on the original
plan.  I can coordinate the effort if that would help (assuming people
who'd like to work on this agree for me to be the coordinator).

FWIW, I'm trying to arrange for some free time in a few months so that
I could make some progress in this matter, but given the past
experience, I don't recommend to count on that.
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Alex Schroeder | 4 Aug 03:39
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz <at> elta.co.il> writes:

> I'd rather ask on emacs-devel for volunteers to carry on the original
> plan.  I can coordinate the effort if that would help (assuming people
> who'd like to work on this agree for me to be the coordinator).

Sadly I don't have much hope at the moment -- it hasn't worked
before, why should it work now?  Merging the current solution will
give users something to work with while we wait for the volunteer we
need to emerge.

Alex.
--

-- 
http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
I was on holidays from 2003-07-01 to 2003-07-29
and have a lot of catching up to do.
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Eli Zaretskii | 4 Aug 08:25
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

> From: Alex Schroeder <alex <at> emacswiki.org>
> Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 03:39:31 +0200
> 
> "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz <at> elta.co.il> writes:
> 
> > I'd rather ask on emacs-devel for volunteers to carry on the original
> > plan.  I can coordinate the effort if that would help (assuming people
> > who'd like to work on this agree for me to be the coordinator).
> 
> Sadly I don't have much hope at the moment -- it hasn't worked
> before, why should it work now?

Perhaps for the same reason you now think the m17n.org code is a
viable solution--because lots of time have passed, and a bidi-capable
Emacs is now more important than before.  Meanwile, some of the
developers have more experience in hacking redisplay code, so their
response might be different this time, especially if the plea sounds
convincing.

> Merging the current solution will give users something to work with
> while we wait for the volunteer we need to emerge.

Someone will have to invest a lot of work to make the m17n.org
solution be satisfactory on the user level.  AFAIK, no one is doing
that now, so we still need volunteers to work on issues like keyboard
input and various aspects of encoding bidirectional text.

Please don't misunderstand me: this is nowhere close to the NIH thing.
I know everything about the virtues of existing solutions.  I saw the
m17n.org code in action when I was in Japan several years ago and had
(Continue reading)

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Alex Schroeder | 4 Aug 16:34
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> elta.co.il> writes:

> Perhaps for the same reason you now think the m17n.org code is a
> viable solution--because lots of time have passed, and a bidi-capable
> Emacs is now more important than before.  Meanwile, some of the
> developers have more experience in hacking redisplay code, so their
> response might be different this time, especially if the plea sounds
> convincing.

Well, we can always try.  I will post a mail on emacs-devel and ask
for volunteers to do it, but I will also suggest the inclusion of
emacs-bidi into current CVS if no volunteer can be found.

The reason I have not much hope is that whenever tricky redisplay
problems used to come up a few month ago, RMS used to CC Gerd and ask
his opinion.  Perhaps Jan D and Kim Storm have had a lot more exposure
to the redisplay code in the meantime.  Having them onboard would
certainly be a good thing.

Alex.
--

-- 
http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
I was on holidays from 2003-07-01 to 2003-07-29
and have a lot of catching up to do.
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Alex Schroeder | 4 Aug 16:54
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merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

Some people have been waiting for a long time for a bidi-enabled Emacs
-- at least I have been waiting for more than a year.  The strange
thing is that we have a working implementation:  emacs-bidi is
available from www.m17n.org, and has been since Emacs 20.3 or earlier.

There are a few imperfections, or so I hear, but when I -- as a
non-Arabic-speaker -- saw the Arabic glyphs rendered correctly on IRC
(using ERC, the Emacs IRC client) -- I was surprised!  Yes, there may
be problems with the existing solution, but at least there *is* a
solution.

I would therefore like to see the existing emacs-bidi implementation
merged with our CVS version.

Back at in the days when Gerd was maintainer, I heard he had issues
with the emacs-bidi implementation and didn't want to use it.  Perhaps
performance was bad.  Perhaps he thought changes to the redisplay code
would be necessary, and he felt that these changes had to wait.
Perhaps you could not turn bidi off at the time.

Well, for somebody like me who just wants to learn Arabic, copy Arabic
song titles from old tapes onto his website, or read the occasional
Arabic greeting on IRC, the current solution is good enough.  And I
don't feel we should wait any longer.  We have waited long enough.

If the reasons for rejecting the current emacs-bidi are still valid,
let's list them and discuss them again.  In the mean time a few people
like Jan D and Kim Storm have had quite some exposure to the redisplay
code, so perhaps we do have the necessary know-how now to fix the
remaining issues.  That would be wonderful.  Eli has already done
(Continue reading)

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Eli Zaretskii | 4 Aug 18:22
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

> From: Alex Schroeder <alex <at> emacswiki.org>
> Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:34:24 +0200
> 
> I will post a mail on emacs-devel and ask
> for volunteers to do it, but I will also suggest the inclusion of
> emacs-bidi into current CVS if no volunteer can be found.

Please do.

> Perhaps Jan D and Kim Storm have had a lot more exposure to the
> redisplay code in the meantime.

Exactly.
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Richard Stallman | 7 Aug 08:05
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

    Some people have been waiting for a long time for a bidi-enabled Emacs
    -- at least I have been waiting for more than a year.  The strange
    thing is that we have a working implementation:  emacs-bidi is
    available from www.m17n.org, and has been since Emacs 20.3 or earlier.

I would expect that it needs merging to be able to be installed
into the current sources.  Is someone interested in doing that work?

    There are a few imperfections, or so I hear, but when I -- as a
    non-Arabic-speaker -- saw the Arabic glyphs rendered correctly on IRC
    (using ERC, the Emacs IRC client) -- I was surprised!  Yes, there may
    be problems with the existing solution, but at least there *is* a
    solution.

What do Hebrew and Arab users think of it?
Eli Z, what is your opinion?

Handa, what do you think?
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Eli Zaretskii | 7 Aug 16:29
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

> From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 02:05:07 -0400
> 
> What do Hebrew and Arab users think of it?
> Eli Z, what is your opinion?

I feel uneasy about using something about which Gerd was most unhappy
at the time this was discussed.

I'd prefer to call for volunteers to continue the work I started,
namely, change the display engine to support bidirectional editing
without processing batches of buffer's text.  (I can elaborate if
there's enough interest.)  I have some unpolished stand-alone code
that does bidi reordering sequentially, which should fit very well
into the Emacs display engine, but someone needs to take that code and
integrate it into Emacs, since I probably won't have time any time
soon enough for this to be practical.

If anyone steps forward willing to begin hacking the display code, I
promise to help in any way I can.
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Oliver Scholz | 8 Aug 11:05
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Re: merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> elta.co.il> writes:

>> From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 02:05:07 -0400
>> 
>> What do Hebrew and Arab users think of it?
>> Eli Z, what is your opinion?
>
> I feel uneasy about using something about which Gerd was most unhappy
> at the time this was discussed.
>
> I'd prefer to call for volunteers to continue the work I started,
> namely, change the display engine to support bidirectional editing
> without processing batches of buffer's text.  (I can elaborate if
> there's enough interest.)  I have some unpolished stand-alone code
> that does bidi reordering sequentially, which should fit very well
> into the Emacs display engine, but someone needs to take that code and
> integrate it into Emacs, since I probably won't have time any time
> soon enough for this to be practical.
>
> If anyone steps forward willing to begin hacking the display code, I
> promise to help in any way I can.

Well, I am probably not yet skilled enough to be of any real help. And
I still have making fontsets customizable as the `car' of my
TODO-list, while the university does not leave much time for me.

But since I have been fascinated by m18n issues, since I started to
use Emacs. And since I'd like to become proficient in display hacking
some time in the future, I would appreciate it, if you could add me to
(Continue reading)

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