Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Egmont Koblinger via Unicode]

Hi,

> Personally, I think we should simply assume that complex script
> shaping is left to the terminal, and if the terminal cannot do that,
> then that's a restriction of working on a text terminal.

I cannot read any of the Arabic, Syriac etc. scripts, but I did lots
of experimenting with picking random Arabic words, displaying in the
terminal their unshaped as well as shaped (using presentation form
characters) variants, and compared them to pango-view's (harfbuzz's)
rendering.

To my eyes the version I got in the terminal with the presentation
form characters matched the "expected" (pango-view) rendering
extremely closely. Of course there's still some tradeoffs due to fixed
with cells (just as in English, arguably an "i" and "w" having the
same width doesn't look as nice as with proportional fonts). In the
mean time, the unshaped characters looks vastly differently.

> OTOH a terminal emulator who wants to perform shaping needs
> information from the application

And the presentation form characters are pretty much exactly that
information, aren't they (for Arabic)?

> There's nothing you can do here [...] there's no way for the application to provide

Instead of saying that it's not possible, could we perpahs try to
solve it, or at least substantially improve the situation? I mean, for
example we can introduce control characters that specify the language.
We can introduce a flag that tells the terminal whether to do shaping
or not. There are probably plenty of more ideas to be thrown in for
discussion and improvement.


cheers,
egmont