Re: [office-comment] marking directionality of text inside a paragraph

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Amir,

Thanks but I am still confused by:

> Let's say that OpenOffice supports this feature; Alice writes a
> document in English, adds one sentence in Hebrew and marks it
> correctly (for example, by selecting the text and pressing the
> appropriate toolbar button). She emails the document to Bob; if Bob
> will see the sentence, it will just appear to him correct and natural
> and won't stand out in any way, like bold text would, so he may fail
> to notice it.
>
> It is not a major problem, but only something that should be kept in
> mind. It's not too hard to solve it either: For example, a toolbar
> button may change when the caret is inside text with different
> directionality, or such text may be displayed with a slightly
> different background color, or the caret itself may change its shape
> etc.

I am not sure why Bob noticing is an issue?

When I got involved with this merry band working on ODF I was studying 
Hebrew (biblical). I don't think I would fail to notice Hebrew, even in 
the middle of a paragraph.

Do you mean that Bob needs a signal for *editing* that the text has 
changed direction?

I would think the application, subject to the issues you point out 
below, should handle that without Bob needing special notice.

Ah, is the problem that Bob can't tell where the change of direction 
takes place?

That is he won't know from looking at the screen whether the caret is 
inside the span with the change in writing direction or not?

No promises but style:writing-mode on <text:span> looks doable to me. 
Ultimate decision will be by the TC. There may be relationships to other 
elements/attributes that I am not seeing on quick review.

The issue of the caret, assuming we have supplied the underlying markup, 
looks more like an application level issue to me. We could insert a note 
to the effect that multi-lingual texts become much easier to edit if the 
caret is used to indicate direction of writing. Or make it possible for 
users to choose such a caret.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick



On 10/18/2011 09:58 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> 2011/10/18 Patrick Durusau<patrick@durusau.net>:
> > Amir,
> >
> > Thanks for the comment!
> Thanks for the quick reply!
>
> > Question:
> >
> > When you say:
> >
> > > A possible challenge in implementing this feature is that the software
> > > must show the user who edits the document that a particular piece of
> > > inline text has different directionality. The directionality of a
> > > paragraph is usually obvious, but the different directionality of
> > > inline text is less obvious (especially when it's set correctly!).
> > > However, this is probably a consideration for the implementers and not
> > > for the standard authors.
> > Why wouldn't directionality of inline text be obvious to the author?
> There are several possible examples of text formatting. A bold font or
> a hyperlink are visually obvious, almost without exception. A
> paragraph for which direction is defined is usually also obvious: its
> alignment usually (although not necessarily) matches the direction
> and, more importantly, the punctuation marks in it appear at the
> correct of the line (possibly the most notorious problem of incorrect
> direction handling is periods and question marks that appear at the
> wrong end of the line).
>
> It is much less obvious in the middle of the paragraph. Most Unicode
> letters are automatically placed in correct order, so one or even ten
> words in Hebrew will appear correctly in an English paragraph.
> Problems with directionality start when numbers, punctuation marks, or
> characters in different directionality enter the picture.
>
> Let's say that OpenOffice supports this feature; Alice writes a
> document in English, adds one sentence in Hebrew and marks it
> correctly (for example, by selecting the text and pressing the
> appropriate toolbar button). She emails the document to Bob; if Bob
> will see the sentence, it will just appear to him correct and natural
> and won't stand out in any way, like bold text would, so he may fail
> to notice it.
>
> It is not a major problem, but only something that should be kept in
> mind. It's not too hard to solve it either: For example, a toolbar
> button may change when the caret is inside text with different
> directionality, or such text may be displayed with a slightly
> different background color, or the caret itself may change its shape
> etc.
>
> Just for comparison: OpenOffice doesn't try to handle inline
> directionality at all. Microsoft Word tries to handle it automatically
> by assuming inline directionality according to the keyboard layout;
> for example, when the user switches the keyboard layout from English
> to Hebrew, Word adds a virtual<span dir="rtl">-like thing at that
> point. Unfortunately, Word doesn't provide any way to remove this
> virtual direction marker except deleting the characters surrounding
> it, and it doesn't provide any way to change the directionality of
> text that was already written.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

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