From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Tue Aug 02 2005 - 00:31:18 CDT
David Starner wrote:
> On 8/1/05, Gregg Reynolds <unicode@arabink.com> wrote:
>
>> RTL display
>>and contextual shaping are relatively trivial. Bidi algorithmics are
>>not.
>
>
> Really? It seems like a pretty simple algorithm to me. In fact, a
> three or four page well-defined algorithm isn't that big a deal.
> There's freebidi (and ICU?) if you want to use someone else's code.
>
All in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I've had a number of
developers tell me specifically that bidi was the show stopper. Easy or
not, it adds cost that would be unneccesary if not for the bidi
requirement.
>
>>Ask yourself, why does Emacs not yet support Arabic et al.?
>
>
> Because Emacs decided to i18n by using ISO-2022 and took a long time
> to get around to accepting Unicode even in conjunction with ISO-2022,
> and there's no programmers specifically concerned with Arabic working
> on it.
And yet it supports tons of other scripts w/out bidi requirements. I
have to believe that has something to do with bidi - it supports shaping
and rtl at the word level, and I believe it supports Hebrew. I guess
the argument is just that you wouldn't need programmers specifically
concerned with Arabic support were it not for bidi, since that is what
"arabic support" means in practice. Anyway I only meant emacs as an
example of a widely used free sw package w/out good Arabic support. I
guess I could be wrong about the whole issue of the cost of bidi, but
that's part of the reason I'm posting these questions. ;)
-gregg
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