Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Adam Borowski via Unicode]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 03:43:10PM +0100, Egmont Koblinger via Unicode wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 3:32 PM Adam Borowski <kilobyte at angband.pl> wrote:
> 
> > > > ╒═══════════╤══════╕
> > > > │ filename1 │  123 │
> > > > │ FILENAME2 │   17 │
> > > > └───────────┴──────┘
> 
> > That's possible only if the program in question is running directly attached
> > to the tty.  That's not an option if the output is redirected.  Frames in
> > a plain text file are a perfectly rational, and pretty widespread, use --
> > and your proposal will break them all.  Be it "cat" to the screen, "less" or
> > even "mutt" if the text was sent via a mail.
> 
> I'd argue that if you have such a data stored in a file, with logical
> order used in Arabic or Hebrew text, combined with line drawing chars
> as you showed, then your data is broken to begin with – broken in the
> sense that it's suitable for automated processing (*), but not for
> display.

A formatted table is pretty unsuitable for automated processing, and
obviously meant for human display.

> (*) but then line drawing chars are not really a nice choice over CSV,
> JSON, whatever.

That's why you use CSV and JSON for machine-readable, plain text for humans,
and XML for neither.

> The only possible choice is for some display engine to be aware that
> line drawing characters are part of a "higher level protocol", and
> BiDi should be applied only in the lower scope. I don't think the
> terminal emulator is the right place to make such decisions

At this point, required information is lost.  Any transformations such as
RTL reordering needs to be done earlier, when you still see _unformatted_
version of the data.

You're a terminal emulator maintainer, thus it's natural for you to think
it's the right place to come up with a solution.  I'd argue that it's not --
all a terminal emulator can do is to display already formatted text, there's
no sane way to move things around.  Any changes need to be localized -- for
example, you can do ligatures only if you keep total length unchanged.  Ie,
the terminal emulator is the right layer for things like complex script
shaping, but not RTL reordering.


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