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Subject: Re: [office] proposal for 15.5.36 style:writing-mode, add 'auto'
On Thursday 14 June 2007 08:52:11 you wrote: > On 13/06/07, Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org> wrote: > > the actual text in the paragraph can be used, in combination with > > unicode tables, to determine the text layout direction > > I'm no expert, but I don't think this is factual Thomas. Unicode > doesn't talk about texts, simply code points, glyphs or characters. > > Inferring the wanted text mode from the character seems somewhat > authoritarian to me. In KOffice we use the FIRST typed character on a new paragraph for the whole paragraphs writing mode. Its been shown to be correct in almost all cases. It surely is something that users have shown appreciation for. Do note that you need the text-direction for a paragraph and that the user just right-aligning text by pressing that toolbar button is not sufficient. > > I would like to suggest we add an 'auto' value to the above list of > > options which would take the value from the text instead of > > specifying this. > > How would you define the directionality of auto? In practice I think you can call it 'undefined'. I'll explain it in a different way; All the paragraph properties coming from a style have a defined property. Think about the strike-through-color to the fontfamily properties. They are all predefined when you start a new paragraph. The text-direction is different. Before you start to type a paragraph it doesn't always need to have a direction. Sometimes it does, other times the direction should be taken from the text of the paragraph itself. (first character, for instance). So, in order to not force all app developers to create an exception to the rules we need an 'undefined' value. Or, as I called it 'auto'. > Think of two authors, one in China, one in Israel. > Then add me with a token 3 Hebrew characters in an otherwise English > text. Existing text will very very likely already have a text-direction as set by the application. So for such paragraph it will be set to 'auto' and thus typing those characters will not change anything. It will just make the text-rendering of that English paragraph with some Hebrew in there be bi-directional. The point at the end of the day, naturally, is how we want to make things easiest for the users of the ODF implementations. And I have to say I didn't even find any way to alter the directionality of a paragraph in OOWriter, so don't try things on that app unless you already know how to do such things ;) As an end user I can expect certain workflows. If the text-direction is set on a page, then I think we can expect the new paragraph to get that text direction. Even if the first character typed is different. This makes sense for 1 English sentence in a further Hebrew text. On the other hand, there are cases where I want the application to be free to deduct the text direction from the text typed. And this usecase is currently impossible. We need an 'auto' directionality for that. I hope this clears up why I think we need this new value. > Direction may not be implemented.Doesn't mean to say it's wrong. I'm not sure I follow this line. -- Thomas Zander
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