From: Ben Dougall (bend@freenet.co.uk)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 13:14:00 EDT
from what little i know about this sort of thing characters have
direction attached to them and the first character in a sequence
dictates the prevailing / main direction, so if a char that is a right
to left char starts then that should be the established norm throughout
that text, so what you describe below does not look good.
maybe this list would be helpful:
<http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/carbon-development>
On Sunday, July 6, 2003, at 03:33 pm, Theodore H. Smith wrote:
>
> Hi people,
>
> I'm having a real headache trying to code for Arabic/Hebrew text
> editing for the Mac. I'm developing a generalised editfield, of course
> I'd like it to edit Japanese too, but Japanese can run in the English
> direction, so that makes it a lot simpler!
>
> I really am in need of some kind of forum or group with programmers
> specialising in Arabic or Hebrew development on the Mac. I am running
> into problems that seem very hard to solve, especially with the lack
> of information and coverage on this.
>
> The problem may be conceptual, I am having a hard time visualising
> ATSUI's (MacOS's unicode display/edit API) modelling sometimes. I'm
> finding in fact visualising reverse direction text a headache.
> Especially seeing as I haven't seen code for working with it like a
> proper text editor should do, yet.
>
> Things like how does the paragraph selection work? This I find really
> very awkward... Heres an example (pretend these numbers and letters
> are Arabic, \r means return, ignore the spaces):
>
> In RAM: 12356789 \r abcdefg \r xyz
>
> Screen: 987654321 \r gfedcba \r zyx
>
> So if I select the onscreen from 2 to \r, which looks perfectly in
> order, then I am actually selecting a discontinuous range! But that
> doesn't seem right! There should be no need to, right? Is an arabic
> UTF document really backwards? So the first character in an arabic UTF
> document is actually the last onscreen?
>
> What really is going on here? What should be going on? Is my example
> wrong? I really can't do any coding on reverse direction text till I
> work out how these paragraphs are meant to be working. Its all really
> rather twisted to me.
>
> I do appreciate the problems here, in fact I made a theoretical
> exploration and found that if we ordered in visual order instead of
> logical, we'd just get a different set of headaches, not really less.
> Such is computing for real-world problems!
>
> Reply directly to me if you can please? At delete@elfdata.com
>
>
> --
> Theodore H. Smith - Macintosh Consultant / Contractor.
> My website: <www.elfdata.com/>
>
>
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