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Re: FriBidi
Guy Keren wrote:
> i still did not understand - what is "glib" ?? why do you base your code
> on a library that is not a 'most common denominator' in unix
> installations?
glib is a c-library that was developed together with gtk, but today it
is separate from it. It defines lots of common datastructures and
prevents reinvention of the wheel over and over again. As glib is
distributed under the same licence as FriBidi, GLPL, I see no reason
why not to use it. Instead I see it as a great way of raising the
common demonimnator, which is far too low in libc. See www.gtk.org
. There are ports of glib to most platforms that you might want to run
FriBidi on. The only platform that I can think that I would like to
port FriBidi to that does not have glib ported to it is the PalmPilot. 8-)
> i'm not sure that the html standard helps much with regards to rendering,
> for a simple reason:
>
> as far as i could see while experimenting with BIDI code, the bidi code is
> employed only _after_ the html tags are being turned into 'screen layout
> commands'. at least this what appeared to happen with hebrew mswind0se.
> and thus, "visual to logical" code needed to figure out how the html code
> will be displayed on the screen, in order to employ the rendering
> properly. (e.g. a tag like & is dealt with as an ampersand character,
> not as the 5 characters '&'. and this is a simple case - handling
> various types of tags is much more complex, unless there is a simple table
> that tells which characters family each html tag belongs to - is there
> such as simple table?
As far as I know there is no support of DIR=RIGHT inside IE/NS on
windows. There indeed should be interaction between the BiDi algorithm
and the layout direction, and that is not supported as far as I just
know. Hebrew just happens to work most of the time because of the way
the underlying OS works, but that is not the way it is supposed to
work according to the HTML 4.0 spec. There has been some discussion
about this on the Mozilla 18n list and the complications involved are
also mentioned in:
http://www.langbox.com/AraMosaic/mozilla/BiDi_API.html
Dov