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David Kastrup | 28 Mar 16:11
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Summary of bidi branch?


Hi,

is there somewhere a summary of where the bidi branch stands nowadays?
How synched is it to actual developments in which branch?

I just got back from a conference where somebody doing critical
editions of Arabic text said that pretty much the only usable editor
(as in: renders characters correctly) for Unicode R-to-L was Unipad
under Windows.

Do people actually use emacs-bidi nowadays?  Does it work for writing?
Just for Hebrew, or other R-to-L scripts, too?

What about crazy things like T-to-B scripts (some Japanese and/or
Chinese variants IIRC)?

I'd be willing to try creating a Yiddish input encoding, though I'd
probably have to think quite a bit of how to encode the various
letters used in Hebrew words.  I don't think there is a standard
unambiguous transliteration scheme for those around.

--

-- 
David Kastrup
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Eli Zaretskii | 28 Mar 23:35
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:11:25 +0200
> 
> is there somewhere a summary of where the bidi branch stands nowadays?

Not that I know of, but I don't think there's much to summarize; see
below.

> How synched is it to actual developments in which branch?

I think no one synchs it.  But the patch is quite localized, so it
shouldn't be hard to merge it with the current CVS HEAD.  At least I
hope so.

> I just got back from a conference where somebody doing critical
> editions of Arabic text said that pretty much the only usable editor
> (as in: renders characters correctly) for Unicode R-to-L was Unipad
> under Windows.

Yes, it's very sad, especially since the core reordering code was
written 5 and a half years ago.  (However, I think there's also Yudit,
http://www.yudit.org/.)

> Do people actually use emacs-bidi nowadays?

I cannot imagine that someone uses it, since it crashes the moment you
turn on the bidi display option, even if the buffer consists of strict
left-to-right characters (e.g., ASCII).  The bidi display engine needs
work before it becomes even marginally usable.  Unfortunately, I don't
have anywhere near the time needed for this kind of job.  I can help
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Eli Zaretskii | 29 Mar 06:15
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:48:48 +0200
> 
> U+05F0  	HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH DOUBLE VAV (U+05F0)
> U+05F1 	HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH VAV YOD (U+05F1)
> U+05F2 	HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH DOUBLE YOD (U+05F2)

They are marked Yiddish because Hebrew words never use such
combinations of letters.  But otherwise they are part of the Hebrew
character set.

> That people writing occasional Yiddish texts might not be used to a
> Hebrew typewriter and would rather get along with the Latin-character
> input based YIVO transliterations.

You could indeed use YIVO, but you could also simply use German.
That's because many Yiddish words are actually Hebrew transliterations
of German words, and even words whose origin is Hebrew are written in
Latin-like transliterations, by adding transliterations of vowels
which the Hebrew original doesn't consider part of the word.  For
example, where in a Hebrew word an `a' is pronounced, the Yiddish
transliteration would add an `א', where `e' is pronounced, it would
add a `ע', etc.
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Alex Gretlein | 30 Mar 06:06
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Re: emacs-bidi Digest, Vol 16, Issue 1

>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:11:25 +0200
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Subject: [emacs-bidi] Summary of bidi branch?
> To: emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> Message-ID: <86vegljw4y.fsf <at> lola.quinscape.zz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> Hi,
>
> is there somewhere a summary of where the bidi branch stands nowadays?
> How synched is it to actual developments in which branch?
>
> I just got back from a conference where somebody doing critical
> editions of Arabic text said that pretty much the only usable editor
> (as in: renders characters correctly) for Unicode R-to-L was Unipad
> under Windows.
>

I wonder what standards he's expecting for rendering? Notepad,
Wordpad, OOo, MS Word, you name it, work fine under Windows (2000/XP)
for Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, as long as you've enabled  support system
wide. Urdu unicode fonts are universally not up to snuff, but that's
Urdu's problem, not solvable in unicode. For that matter WYSIWYG
editors in web pages in IE and Firefox also render all three languages
just fine.

Under Linux, Katoob is specifically designed for this, but Gedit,
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James Cloos | 30 Mar 23:40
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

>>>>> "David" == David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> writes:

David> Not that it probably matters much for a first try: do you know Arabic?

No.  I've tried to learn the script a bit -- ie to be able to sound
out and/or transliterate arabic script into latin script -- as part
of a general interest in font design and i18n, but I cannot claim
any competence in the spoken language beyond the few words anyone
would pick up listening to the news.

I just knew it would be easy to activate X's input method and type
out the quail file.

-JimC
--

-- 
James Cloos <cloos <at> jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
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Eli Zaretskii | 30 Mar 13:41
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:34:49 -0400
> From: Michael Blaustein <Michael.Blaustein <at> sjca.edu>
> Cc: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>, emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> 
> It's not that bad!  (Assuming you mean emacs-bidi-0.9.1 at
> www.m17n.org.)

No, that's not what I meant.  David was asking about the bidi branch
of the Emacs CVS, which has nothing in common with the m17n version.
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Eli Zaretskii | 30 Mar 13:45
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 08:44:10 +0200
> 
> > You could indeed use YIVO, but you could also simply use German.
> 
> For getting Hebrew letters?

Yes.  In Yiddish, Hebrew letters are used as transliterations of Latin
letters.

> > That's because many Yiddish words are actually Hebrew
> > transliterations of German words, and even words whose origin is
> > Hebrew are written in Latin-like transliterations, by adding
> > transliterations of vowels which the Hebrew original doesn't
> > consider part of the word.  For example, where in a Hebrew word an
> > `a' is pronounced, the Yiddish transliteration would add an `א',
> 
> Uh, no.  The vowel mark is missing.

These marks are redundant (as they are in Hebrew): any speaker of the
language will have no difficulty reading the word without the
diacriticals (so-called Nikkud).

> Well, I know how to transliterate Yiddish with Latin characters.  But
> that's not the point.

Frankly, I don't know what is the point.  I thought you needed a way
to write Yiddish without bidi support, so I suggested a
transliteration, but perhaps you want something else.
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Eli Zaretskii | 30 Mar 14:37
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: Michael Blaustein <Michael.Blaustein <at> sjca.edu>, emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:54:09 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:34:49 -0400
> >> From: Michael Blaustein <Michael.Blaustein <at> sjca.edu>
> >> Cc: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>, emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> >> 
> >> It's not that bad!  (Assuming you mean emacs-bidi-0.9.1 at
> >> www.m17n.org.)
> >
> > No, that's not what I meant.  David was asking about the bidi branch
> > of the Emacs CVS, which has nothing in common with the m17n version.
> 
> As far as I can tell, m17n provides a Mule based on 20.x, or on a 21
> pretest at most.
> 
> Hard to figure out.  That code likely is not of much help, right?

There's some history to the m17n bidi version.  A patch to handle bidi
display was submitted to Emacs back when v21.1 was in last stages of
development.  It was rejected (based on negative reaction of Gerd
Moellmann, the then head maintainer and the main developer of the v21
display engine) because it used techniques that defeated all the usual
display optimizations used by Emacs, such as when you just move the
cursor or insert or delete a single character.  The patch also used a
constant-size buffer to stack characters while they were being
reordered -- which doesn't scale well to very long lines.
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Eli Zaretskii | 30 Mar 14:58
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:20:33 +0200
> 
> > Yes.  In Yiddish, Hebrew letters are used as transliterations of
> > Latin letters.
> 
> Uh, Eli?  I know Yiddish.

I never assumed you didn't.

> Uh no.  I need a way to write Yiddish with Hebrew letters, and so I
> was thinking of making emacs-bidi more interesting by adding (myself)
> another input encoding yielding Hebrew letters, based on the YIVO
> transliteration.

I think it would be a good addition, not only in the bidi Emacs.

> And I don't think we have any arabic input encoding in Emacs 22.

We do have the encoding (arabic-iso-8bit, albeit not thoroughly
supported), but not an input method.

> The only R-to-L script I can identify in Emacs 22 is Hebrew.  Of
> course, Emacs 22 will render it L-to-R, but making it possible to
> _input_ the Unicode might increase the number of people willing to
> invest work into emacs-bidi.

If all you want is to input characters, and don't care about
displaying them correctly, then making an input method that produces
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Eli Zaretskii | 30 Mar 19:09
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Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: Michael.Blaustein <at> sjca.edu, emacs-bidi <at> gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:50:57 +0200
> 
> During the Emacs 21 pretest phase, I submitted dozens of bug reports
> about display engine problems in connection with preview-latex.  I
> think that quite a number of optimizations got killed because of that:

Yes, but the most important (those I mentioned and a few similar ones)
are still there.  Gerd told me back then that he actually tried the
display engine without any optimizations, and found that it was
unusably slow.

> IIRC, emacs-bidi was supposed to be a rather clean design implementing
> the specs quite straightly, correct?

If you mean the UAX#9, then yes, the intent was to do exactly what it
says.

> So one will probably have more
> cleanup remaining outside of the patch itself than inside it, right?

I don't know.  There are a few gray areas in UAX#9, which we would
need to interpret as best for Emacs.

> I am just trying to get some feeling about the situation, to get a
> guess how much work might be entailed before it is realistic to think
> about getting it into some release in the future.

I think we will not have any idea about this until Someone(tm) will
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