[lltx] bidi package extended for LuaLaTeX

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 11:12:45PM +1100, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
> 
> Just to let you know, I talked to taco about implementing unicode bidirectional
> algorithm and taco said it is better that I wait untill luatex 0.70 is
> released.
> 
> "As I have written on the dev-luatex mailing list in the past, we are not
> quite happy with our inherited direction code from Aleph (Omega). See
> for example these tracker items :
> 
>  http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=306
>  http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=301
>  http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=232
> 
> The Aleph subsystem is more flexible than the \beginL/R from pdftex,
> but nevertheless it has a number of oddities that are hard to work with.
> 
> You'll see that the trackers above are marked for version 0.70 (that
> will be fall 2010) so the changes resulting from them will be too late
> for this year's texlive. It appears unavoidable that direction support
> luatex in 0.70 will be backward incompatible with 0.60.
> 
> Because of this, it may be counterproductive to spend much of your time
> on implementing the unicode bidi algorithm in lua right now. My advice
> would be to use active characters for text direction switches, and stick
> to macro-based solutions for paragraph, math and page body setups. Just
> so you won't have to redo lots of lua code next year."

Thanks for sharing this.

I knew about the expected rewrite, but I got bored of waiting, I got
around this by abstracting the Unicode algorithm implementation from the
node list processing, so the former will not much be affected by changes
in luatex, while the later is much less code right now and I don't mind
re-writing it as we goes, that is part of the fun.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer


-- 
To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.