Bidi paragraph direction in terminal emulators (was: Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators)

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Mon, 04 Feb 2019 22:39:07 +0200
Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2019 19:45:13 +0000
> > From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> > 
> > Yes.  If one has a text composed of LTR and RTL paragraphs, one has
> > to choose how far apart their starting margins are.  I think that
> > could get complicated for plain text if the terminal has unbounded
> > width.  
> 
> But no real-life terminal does.  The width is always bounded.

The Emacs terminal (M-x term) seems to be a reasonable approximation,
with the scroll-left and scroll-right commands changing the margins'
separations.  This is an example of a terminal that has lines with
left-to-right character paths and lines with right-to-left
character paths.  (Such lines are necessarily separated by blank
lines.)  Geometrically, column positions on left-to-right and
right-to-left character paths are incomparable - resizing the window
and scrolling move them differently.

Richard.