Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> But if the buffer is mostly ordinary LTR text, but has a little RTL
> text in it, the non-bidi user will probably not notice that and could
> get fooled.  That is the case for which I think a warning is useful.

When I see a bit of hebrew text in a buffer, I wouldn't know if it's
displayed L2R or R2L and either way wouldn't make any difference to me,
so I'm definitely not "fooled".

This happens reasonably often, and I wouldn't want to be "warned" that
there's some R2L script in my buffer, since I can see it plainly since
the characters are different anyway.

The problematic case that started this thread was because strongly L2R
characters were displayed in R2L fashion because of their context.
And *that* is indeed a problem, because there was no obvious visual
clue: the reversed chars were all latin chars.

So, if we want to emit a warning, it should not be when "there's some
R2L text in an L2R context" but only when L2R characters end up layed out in
R2L because of the context.

I'm not familiar enough with bidi uses to know for sure whether such
"forced wrong-way layout" is something that can occur regularly in
normal/legitimate situations, but at least it's something that would
fool me every time, so I think a warning would be OK for those cases.


        Stefan