From: Alessandro Baretta (alex@baretta.com)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 09:46:00 EDT
Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> 
> Are you sure you are using a bidi-enabled build of
> AbiWord?  AbiWord has been buildable with and without
> the bidi support which AbiWord needs for Arabic to
> work properly.  Check where you got it from to see if
> they have both versions and look for "bidi".
> 
> In the future Arabic will work with all builds so this
> problem will go away.
> 
> Andrew Dunbar.
> 
Yes, as I already stated in a former post, which you might 
not have received, I am using two different bidi builds of 
Abiword: 1.0.0 for Linux and 1.0.1 for Windows.
I have performed a more attentive test and I noticed that 
both versions seem to malfunction in an identical fashion. I 
originally thought there might be a bug in one of libraries 
that Abiword relies on and that were already present in my 
Mandrake distro before installing Abiword. This is probably 
not the case since the following malfunctioning also occurs 
with the Windows version.
In the following lines I show what happens when I type "The 
quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." while using the 
right-to-left feature of the Format->Paragraph menu item. 
Use a vertical bar (pipe) to indicate the position of the 
cursor.
 > |ehT
 > The q|kciu
 > The quick b|nwor
 > The quick brown f|xo
 > The quick brown fox j|spmu
 > The quick brown fox jumps o|rev
 > The quick brown fox jumps over t|eh
 > The quick brown fox jumps over the l|yza
 > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d|.go
 > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.\n
As you can see words initially appear reversed to a 
right-to-left character ordering, but after each space the 
words are reversed back to their normal left-to-right 
appearance. It is also interesting to notice how all words 
after the first one do not appear correctly reversed because 
the first letter remains to the left of the cursor, while 
the following letters appear to the right. If the developers 
deem it useful, I could produce a sequence of screenshots to 
show the exact appearance on screen of the characters as I 
type them.
It would be very interesting for me to receive news about 
other users' experience with the right-to-left feature. It 
seems to me very strange that the Abiword team would not 
notice such a gross bug. For this reason I have not yet 
filed a bug report: I would like to ascertain the nature of 
the malfunctioning first.
Thank you very much for your time and interest.
Alex Baretta
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 11 2002 - 07:44:58 EDT