Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 27174
Immitating eLaTex L2R/R2L parenthesis, to bound L2R text
Last modified: 2013-08-07 15:00:01 UTC
eLaTeX presents an interesting idea to controll directionality of paragraphs, and in-paragraph words. It offers two types of of "Directionality parenthesis" \L{} and \R{} which denoted L2R and R2L directionality respectively. Shortly, one writes a paragraph, whose main directionality is determined in the head of the paragraph (by \sethebrew and \unsethebrew BTW) and in-paragraph english sentences are written inside a \L{} parenthesis. EXAMPLE: HEBREW PRAGRAPH TEXT \L{some english 123} obviously it works the other way around, with English paragraph using \R for in-paragraph hebrew sentences, thus, numbers and punctuations' directionality can be determined. As using LaTeX notation in a WYSIWYG editor, I suggest we'll implement an "English/Hebrew Box" feature. That is when English text is written in the middle of R2L hebrew paragraph, a sign denoting the beginning of an in-paragraph English sentence will be shown before this wordand a special key will allow the user to end the English section whenever he desires. The text inside the "English box" will be rendered as if it is a L2R text and punctuations' font will be Latin. Obviously similar thing will happen to Hebrew text in an English L2R paragraph. PLEASE NOTE: this will save as the trouble of using character-types, also it will save as the trouble of implementing IME recognition algorithm.
BTW this can be implemented using LRM signs in the end of each English-sentence box, so that the implementation doesn't need to interfere with BIDi and copy/pasting the text will be possible.
DL->AMA: Could you please handle this?
Our plan is to implement a character attribute text direction (right-to-left or left-to-right) which could be inserted via dialog/toolbar but which could be inserted automatically by analysing the selected language of the IME. But we do not have the resource for OOo2.0, it will be implemented later.
I don't think that attributing directionality to each character would be wise. It causes problems when importing plaintext and many spaces unintentionaly gets the wrong direction. It's very difficult to change their directionality. I think that my sollution is still better and more user-friendly, as the user will clearly see the directionality he's working is, and you do not need keyboard input language.