[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 152125] Ease use of Unicode control characters for bidirectionality, e.g. RLI and PDI

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152125

--- Comment #10 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> ---
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #6)
> My question was how the RTL people would like to insert the control
> characters. 

Personally, like I said - keyboard shortcut. That let's you use these marks as
part of the flow of typing, or when modifying existing text - while looking at
that text and navigating with the keyboard, which is easier than navigating to
different positions with the mouse: The former navigates logically, the latter
visually.

But I may not be a "representative sample"... it's actually not easy to answer
your question, especially considering how lay users simply don't know about
these.

> Sounds pretty simple to have a command "Make selection run from
> left-to-right" and another one for the opposite (not sure we need this) and
> insert the unicode characters before/after.

That is not simple IMHO, and not a good idea for two reasons:

1. It involves state for a selection rather for a character. Without control
chars, you just have characters with strong, weak or no directionality - and an
RLM/LRM is the same thing, except that its width is zero. That is a simpler
mental model than selections with direction state.
2. People who know the control characters, or who know what RTL and LTR is,
would not be able to guess exactly what this command does just by reading it -
and personally I would worry it does something complex and "scary", in the
sense that it would clash with I can do manually. It's true that a help
document alleviates that somewhat, but still.

I was faced with a similar challenge for my RTL support extension for
Thunderbird, and opted for the context section to have "Insert Control
Character" submenu, with the items being: "Right-to-Left Mark" and
"Left-to-Right Mark" - no option to insert something else. I might have added
the acronym in parentheses, not sure why I decided against it.

If we want to make the other control chars easily-insertable - and I'm not at
all sure that we do - then I would keep those two entries at the top of the
submenu, add a separator, then offer the other marks.

> Second part is the feedback. Once you have inserted those zero-width
> characters you probably want to know that. My take here was to use a 
> kind of vertical I-beam symbol (using the pilcrow-blue makes sense here).

So, it's important this doesn't clash with other I-beam-like indications (like
start or end of bookmarks?); and what happens when you also have a character
border on the side, especially if it's a similar color.

I'll make another suggestion - not rejecting yours, just a thought: Thinking
about the visible/invisible toggle, I might let myself be more expansive and
let the indicator take up space: An icon indicating the direction, e.g. a
triangle or arrow, perhaps similar to what we have on the toolbar - but not
with the pilcrow symbol itself, since it's not about the paragraph. The upside
is that the meaning is better indicated, the downside is that it may
significantly affect the text layout, causing words to overflow the line and
move to another line, with that in itself having potential undesirable effect
directionality-wise.

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