Re: Valid UTF-8 text mangled up in GtkLabel

[Lina Kemmel <LKEMMEL il ibm com>]

Hi Behdad, Jonathan,

> I use gedit on a daily basis to type text with Persian and
> English paragraphs, and I want my Persian paragraphs to be set ar
> RTL and aligned to right, and English paragraphs LTR and aligned
> to left. 

I doubt this opinion is shared by many... My own preference is to
have all the paragraphs of a document of the same direction. (Even
in the absence of a strong RTL stuff, I still prefer seeing e.g. a
period to the left of the rest of text - provided my intention was
to have a fundamentally RTL document.) ...And I'd only make use of
markup in those rare cases when I wish the dominant direction to be
overridden in a specific paragraph.

Automatic direction selection may cause confusion to end users.
For example, when seeing the following *centered* text created by
somebody else:

    ltrLTR

- how should I read it - as "l-t-r-R-T-L" or "R-T-L-l-t-r"? I have
no idea of author's intention.

> > For example, email addresses are always LTR,

> No.  I want my email addresses with Persian name to be set RTL,
> something like:

>                                                               |
>                     <something somewhere org> DOBHAFSE DADHEB |
>                                                               |

IMHO email addresses should always be LTR, even though start with
a RTL name.

> > text editing must always be user-selectable.

> Yes, in a broken design, yes.  fortunately GNOME has left that
> philosophy behind since around 2000 when the HIG work started.
> Users should be able to just use applications, not teach them how
> to do tasks.  Teaching computers is what developers should do.

Sorry, I can't agree that contextual direction treatment is a good
design. Introducing it recently, by the way, is the only reason
I'm not upgrading my GNOME...

> The bidi algorithm currently only handles plain text...

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-11.html#Higher-Level_Protocols

> ... and with my definition, email addresses are
> not plain text.  I've already sketched a solution ... 

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168108

This link is currently not accessible...

Thanks,
Lina