Re: Message Mode and bidi

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
>> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2024 08:54:54 -0800
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > But beware: doing this in Emacs will cause effects that are unpleasant
>> > to readers of bidirectional text, because you could have "chess-like"
>> > text display, like this:
>> >
>> > asasasasasasasasasasasasassa
>> >                                                 ASASASASASASASASASASASASA
>> > xcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxc
>> >                                                        JKJNJKKKNKNKNKNKNK
>> >
>> > etc.  Here upper-case letters stand for RTL (like Arabic or Farsi)
>> > text and lower-case letters stand for LTR (like Latin or Cyrillic)
>> > text.
>> 
>> This is the effect I was imagining in the header section of the message
>> buffer, and why I thought we should probably skip trying to handle this.
>> message-mode headers can be "continuation headers", as well, effectively
>> line-wrapped, which would make it even harder.
>
> Yes.  But the same can happen in the body of the message, and will IMO
> be even more annoying, because people do care about the body.
>
>> Thanks for the background! I guess I was hoping that we could at least
>> support OP's original request, which is making the first paragraph of
>> the message body independent of the mail header separator as regards
>> BIDI display. I experimented with putting the value of
>> `mail-header-separator' into `bidi-paragraph-start|separate-re', but
>> couldn't get it to display that first paragraph starting on the right.
>> Do you think this is feasible, and worth the effort?
>
> No, I don't think it's worth the effort, even if you succeed.  The
> price of leaving an empty line after the headers is so small that it
> isn't worth the hassle to try to avoid it.  Once the user does that a
> few times, the technique will be burned into his/her muscle memory (I
> know because I went through that process myself, long ago).

Okay, fair enough! Thanks again.