Re: [Usability] RFC: #61866

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

David Moles <david moles vykor com> writes:

> On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 11:29, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > David Moles <david moles vykor com> writes:
> > 
> > > Out of curiosity, is there a way (in internationalization, for instance)
> > > to lay out the tree right-to-left, and in that case what happens to
> > > these "move focus" keys?
> > 
> > Right.  C-f is forward, C-b is back, Left is left, and Right is right.
> > In a L->R language C-f == Right and C-b == Left.  In a R->L language,
> > these are reversed.
> 
> Seems like it would be easy to screw that up -- if the developer
> was thinking in Emacs terms, but you're using a Windows-style
> keyboard theme, you might find on switching to Arabic or whatever
> that Left suddenly meant right and Right suddenly meant left. Or,
> conversely, that C-f suddenly meant backwards and C-b forwards --
> though I suppose if your whole environment is in Arabic you're
> probably not thinking f-for-forward and b-for-backward anyway. :)
> 
> Is implementing "forward" and "backward" separate from "left" and
> "right" something the internationalization libraries help you do,
> or is it something you'd have to be lucky to think of?

<offtopic>

The direction of C-f/C-b is determined by the direction of the primary
language, and is important for text fields w/ mixed polarity text.
Consider the following line:

The red car stopped

Hitting right 19 times takes you from the beginning of the sentence to
the end.  Hitting C-f does the same.  Now image that instead of 'car
stopped', you have R->L text used.  It would look like:

The red deppots rac

In this case, hitting C-f will take you from the space after 'd' to the
'c' in car.  Here, you are going through the letters in the order you
read them, which is different from the order on the screen.

</offtopic>

-Jonathan