[Fribidi-discuss] Some thoughts about BiDi Quirks Handling

[Shachar Shemesh]

Just wanted to state the obvious - I would find such a feature useful as 
well.

A few comments:

Omer Zak wrote:

>Possible approaches:
>--------------------
>1. Implement few "quirks" flags in FriBidi (the FriBidiEnv structure has
>   room for those flags).  When set, those flags would cause FriBidi to
>   behave like one of the incompatible BiDi algorithms.
>
Most convinient to users, no doubt, but isn't it a bit out of fribidi's 
charter? MS, for various inexplicable reasons, is using totally 
incompatible algorithm. I know that, when I suggested I use their 
original one under WINE, there was an outrage of "don't do that, use the 
proper one and we'll get better apps behaviour". I don't know about that 
one. If it's the one taken, however, I'll gladly use it.

>2. Add to FriBidi special code, which would flag the characters in a
>   string, which would be reordered differently in the different BiDi
>   algorithms.  The wordprocessor would then display those characters in a
>   different way, and let the user determine whether they were reordered
>   the way he intended to or not.
>
I think the best way to handle that one (and perhaps solve the "1" 
problem without breaking charter) is to adopt the new proposed 
interface. With the new interface, the char types are calculated by one 
function, and then this array is passed on to a second function for 
reordering. I even believe (have not checked yet) that we can implement 
the MS quirks by simply overriding some character's types BiDi types to 
another, existing, Unicode BiDi types, and then using the same algorithm.

>3. The import filters, used by the Free wordprocessors to import files
>   created by a given version of Microsoft wordprocessor, would insert
>   explicit BiDi overrides at those places where the BiDi algorithms would
>   produce different visual orderings of characters.
>
But then, what about Wine? What about OpenOffice? What about Mozilla 
(actually, I think they are using their own algorithm already)? What 
about QT KWord? What about Pango?

>
>Of the possible approaches, I favor the most the "quirks" flags approach.
>When importing a document, the user has anyway to specify which
>wordprocessor created it.  It is not a big deal to specify also the
>corresponding BiDi algorithm version.
>
>In the internal representation of documents used by Free wordprocessors,
>an extra field to specify the BiDi algorithm needs to be added.  But if
>the wordprocessor was designed in a reasonable way, it should not be
>difficult to add a paragraph-scope attribute to specify the BiDi algorithm
>to be applied to that paragraph.  (Note:  paragraph scope is needed to
>handle the case of an user, who wants to merge together documents created
>by different wordprocessors, which used different BiDi algorithms.) 
>
>                                             --- Omer
>WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  see at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
>
>
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