Re: Being constructive [Was: Nit-picking]

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:14:03 +0100
> From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> CC: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Continuing and perhaps even finishing my bidi display code has been a
> > pipe dream for several years now, so it's probably not even worth
> > mentioning.
> >   
> 
> A smaller task might be to make use of the functionality of libotf/m17n 
> and uniscribe (and any Mac equivalent) to provide bidi support on those 
> platforms which offer underlying support.

In general, I don't believe that we can use an external library for
this, even if we only restrict ourself to displaying bidirectional
text, because bidi considerations must be applied to the basic
iterator machinery that walks Emacs buffers and prepares the glyph
matrices for display.  Too many Emacs features depend on that.

But I could be wrong, so someone should certainly study this
possibility seriously.

> If work is started now, I think we can get this in to Emacs 23.  I
> don't know how far emacs-bidi is from completion, but I'm guessing
> it will be at least Emacs 24 material?

No one is working on the emacs-bidi branch, so it's more like it's
Emacs 240 material...