Re: Hebrew xlation of Emacs tutorial

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 17:21:24 +0100
> 
> I don't think that this is the only issue.  Eli might correct me on
> that, but the last time this issue came up, he clearly stated that the
> bidi branch was not production quality and had serious stability and
> performance issues.

David is right: the bidi branch is just a first attempt to make the
display engine support bidirectional languages.  It needs a lot of
debugging to become usable.  In particular, as soon as you turn on the
bidi support flag, Emacs instantly crashes.

> We certainly don't want it to be "merged into the
> emacs-unicode-2 branch" before Emacs 23 is released: emacs-unicode-2
> is a major step forward and apparently close to release quality.

I rather hope that Emacs 23 will come out with bidi support (since
Unicode requires that), but that hope has no basis whatsoever.

> There are also other issues which should probably be addressed when
> reworking the display engine for bidi, like composite character
> support and antialiasing

I'm not aware of any such issues, but then the implications of bidi
redisplay were never discussed in detail.