Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Eli Zaretskii via Unicode]

> From: Egmont Koblinger <egmont at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 10:11:22 +0100
> Cc: unicode at unicode.org
> 
> > It doesn't do _any_ shaping.  Complex script shaping is left to the
> > terminal, because it's impossible to do shaping in any reasonable way
> > [...]
> 
> Partially, you are right. On the other hand, as far as I know, shaping
> should take into account the neighboring glyphs even if those are not
> visible (e.g. overflow from the viewport), and the terminal is unaware
> of what those glyps are. This is an area that "presentation form"
> characters can address for Arabic – although as it was pointed out,
> not for Syrian and some others.

Arabic presentation forms are more like an exception than a rule, I
hope you understand this by now.  Most languages/scripts don't have
such forms, and even for Arabic they cover only a part of what needs
to be done to present correctly shaped text.  Complex script shaping
is much more than just substituting some glyphs with others, it
requires an intimate knowledge of the font being used and its
capabilities, and the ability to control how various glyphs of a
grapheme cluster are placed relative to one another, something that an
application running on a text terminal cannot do.

So I suggest that you don't consider Arabic presentation forms a
representative of the direction in which terminal emulators supporting
such scripts should evolve.