[sword-devel] reversed BHS

[David Burry]

I agree with this.  According to the Unicode standard the "original
direction" of the bytes in a given text is supposed to be from beginning
to end, regardless of the way it's presented to the end user.  To
display such a text ideally BiDi should be handled properly by the
rendering engine, and for rendering engines that cannot handle it (yet)
a BiDi converter filter should be applied (giving it the current margin
width, etc)....  Changing the order of the characters in the module to
be backwards within each line but still have the lines in forward order
is not the right way to do it, since it wouldn't even be Unicode any
longer.

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: sword-devel-admin@crosswire.org
[mailto:sword-devel-admin@crosswire.org] On Behalf Of Christian Renz
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2003 2:53 PM
To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] reversed BHS


>I'm not sure how creating a text that is written in its original 
>direction
>violates the standard, but I don't know much about Unicode either so
that 
>doesn't say much.

I'm not a Unicode wise-guy, but here's my take on this: There is no
"left" or "right" in a file. There is just a first character, then a
second one, etc. until the last one. 

Displaying left-to-right or right-to-left is purely a presentation
issue. If you put a Unicode-encoded Hebrew text in a file, it is from
beginning to end -- just like English or Chinese texts. The renderer
then takes care (using the BiDi-functions) that the display is correct.

What you would be suggesting is to probably break up the text into the
lines and store them "in its original direction". Chris is rightly
reacting somewhat allergic to that, since it is going to bring about
lots of problems. It is probably easier to just fix the software.

Greetings,
   Christian

-- 
crenz@web42.com - http://www.web42.com/crenz/ - http://www.web42.com/

"It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one."  --
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