[XeTeX] Texworks

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 06:43:22PM +0100, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> Am 19.12.2009 um 12:13 schrieb Vafa Khalighi:
> 
> >if you insert those characters
> >before \begin{document}, you will certainly get error from TeX
> >complaining
> >that \begin{document} is missing.
> 
> 
> That's right, and therefore I never recommended this. Since a XeTeX
> source document is either a mix of LTR TeX code plus RTL text or
> completely rather LTR, it might work to embed the RTL regions by
> inserting this or that of the RTL or LTR directing characters...

This is not needed, what TeXworks is missing (actually Qt4 text editing
widget) is automatic detection paragraph base direction based on the
first strong bidi character; paragraph base direction governs wither a
given paragraph is an RTL paragraph with embedded LTR text and vice versa.
Unicode bidi algorithm describes a way to compute paragraph base
direction, but also suggests that it can be left to higher level
protocols to set it; Qt4 chose the later and thus it is each individual
application's duty to set the correct paragraph base direction (which
is kind retarded IMO, it'd have been better to compute it by default and
provide a way for applications that want to to override it to do so).

Automatic base direction detection shouldn't be hard to implement, given
one has sufficient Qt knowledge (which I don't have).

Regards,
 Khaled

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