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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Re: Hebrew transliteration (Lance Petersen)

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Lance Petersen <petersenlance AT yahoo.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: Hebrew transliteration (Lance Petersen)
  • Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 11:35:04 -0800

On 22/01/2004 10:31, Lance Petersen wrote:

...

One of the limitations of the software is fatal. It uses ASCII text and left
to right reading order. Every line in the Hebrew text has a carriage return
that I've put in. If I change screen resolution or simply change the window
size, the text suddenly looks like something found in a diaper. I'm limited
to a single font, and nobody can view it without that font. (Yeah, I know,
I'm the only one that was supposed to see it.) I could go on forever. These
were all things Peter Kirk brought up in his side of the discussion. I am all
for Peter and his buddies creating fixes for these kinds of problems. I'm
also all for people letting the developers know what their needs and
objections are. The Unicoders (for lack of a better term) and other
developers are far more apt to listen to some members of this list because of
their credentials than they are to someone like me. That's why I thought the
discussion was vital. Let those problems get hammered out now. That way, I ,
or someone li
ke me,
won't see years worth of work on a pet project go up in flames because of a
software oversight.


This issue is technically independent of Unicode, but in practice closely linked to it. Most computers, because they were designed in the west, by default display characters starting at the top left and then across the screen in lines which then move down the page, although this is only one of several schemes used in the world.

Schemes for displaying Hebrew which do not go into the depths of the system software are forced to use this left-to-right default setup. They get round the problem by storing Hebrew text reversed, in so-called visual order. This makes it very hard to edit, but the main problem is with line wrapping; it is necessary to code in hard line breaks, and if the lines are wider than the window the text gets into the state which you so graphically described. It is not an "oversight" but a deliberate design choice that your package works like this. Packages like TeX include functions to reverse the text order so that it is displayed correctly, but only in a predefined page width.

The only alternative to this is to use a system which has been specially developed or modified to support proper right-to-left display. In fact current versions of Windows, MacOS and Linux have been modified successfully, originally for the Middle East market but now for the world market. This means that Hebrew (and Arabic, Syriac etc) text stored in logical order, i.e. with the first letter of the Hebrew word first, can be displayed properly. But this works correctly only if the Hebrew text is encoded in the way that the system expects it to be encoded. And, although in principle many encodings could be used (though they would have to be ones in which Hebrew is distinguished from Latin at the code point level and not in higher level markup e.g. choice of font), in practice the only supported encoding for pointed Hebrew is, surprise surprise, Unicode.

If you don't like Unicode, you can always rewrite the Linux kernel to support logical order Hebrew with your own preferred encoding. But it is a lot less effort to use Unicode!

As for your specific setup, it will continue to work, but it won't get any better as the company is defunct. You might like to look at the packages from http://www.logos.com/; their Hebrew text is Unicode-based and so should not have the word wrap problem. But I don't know if it can do the other things which your current package does.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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