Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Egmont Koblinger via Unicode]

Hi Richard,

> My main interest in this, though, is in improving the general run of
> Indic terminal cell editors.  If we can get Gnome-terminal working for
> Kharoshthi, things should improve for LTR Indic.  Even working on the
> false assumption that Indic scripts are like Devanagari would be an
> improvement, despite my comments about Khmer.

So, as for concrete bugs, there's the aforementioned VTE bug 584160.
You might want to give the pending patches a try, or (to keep the
relevant discussion at one place) comment over there about your
desired priorities etc.

We've also set up a "Terminal WG" on freedesktop
(https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg), a place intended for
specifications. If you/we feel like certains bits around
Devanagari/Khmer/etc. handling need a proper specification before we
could jump to the implementation, probably that would be the best
platform to discuss that. Reason being that I don't know when I'd be
able to address them, if ever, but there are multiple terminal
emulator developers waiting there for such challenges. Also, IMHO a
bugtracker is a better forum than a mailing list if parties can't all
immediately work on the problem :)

I'm definitely aiming to fix the basic Devanagari rendering (that is:
spacing marks), for this autumn's VTE release. Maybe even for this
spring's. I probably won't do more (like Virama), they'll have to wait
for the HarfBuzz port.


cheers,
egmont