bug#22786: 25.1.50; eww arabic rendering

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Is there a simple heuristic we could use to determine that we're on a
>> page where we should flip the paragraph direction?
>
> The heuristic that we have happens automagically if
> bidi-paragraph-direction is nil.  (It's not a heuristic, it's what the
> Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm prescribes to do.)  Then each
> paragraph gets its own direction computed on the fly.

They prescribe a heuristic.  :-)

>> Some pages may have a bit of RTL text without wanting to change the
>> paragraph direction (like most Wikipedia pages)...
>
> Exactly.  Which is why we changed eww to its current default.
>
> I think at this stage we should add to the eww menu an item that
> allows to change the page direction, and let users override the
> default if needed.  This should solve most, if not all, of the cases
> where the default doesn't DTRT.

Well, Firefox displays the web page correctly without Firefox users
having to do anything in particular, so presumably eww should be able to
do the same, I would have thought?

That is, eww should leave `bidi-paragraph-direction' to nil (which makes
the Al Jazeera web page display correctly), and then it...  shouldn't be
so eager to switch the direction of paragraphs to rtl just because a
section starts with some rtl text.  Or something.

-- 
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   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no