[luatex] Direction of hbox inside math

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 10:12:15AM +0200, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >>However, I think this is not clean, I believe a clean way for latex's tabular
> >>is to have a primitive \halignR, such that it makes tabular RTL, if Taco wants,
> >>I even can send a source code where he can actually extract the implementation
> >>of \halignR from the source code.
> >
> >ConTeXt can do tables with no resorting to math mode and it works very
> >well for Arabic, so it is a matter of stupid LaTeX choice than lack of
> >proper primitives.
> 
> Right, so let's forget about latex's tabular in the rest of the
> discussion. Patching the executable for this reason is even worse
> than having to patch the latex source code.

OK, and I did patch latex's tabular in the past, it just occurred to me
now it is more logical for hboxes to inherit the text direction, fixing
tabular is merely a side effect of this.

> IMHO (and bear in mind that I do not know anything about arabic math
> typesetting) I think Khaled is right: it would make considerably
> more sense for all \hboxes to always use the current \textdir unless
> instructed otherwise. \hboxes in vertical mode currently inherit
> \bodydir, which I think is even weirder perhaps.

Any chance to get both fixed (even temporally) in 0.60.x? I know the
multi-directional subsystem is bending a rewrite, but it would be nice
to have such annoyances fixed in the meantime, of course if it doesn't
require a great effort.

Regards,
 Khaled

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