Question: bidi navigation

[Nir Lisker]

This is a tricky one. All applications I have seen, and I think that's what
people expect, is that the cursor changes direction during traversal.

A key point is where the paragraph is aligned to (in Windows adjusted with
left CTRL+SHIFT and right CTRL+SHIFT). This sets the forward and backward
direction: if the paragraph is left-aligned, pressing the right arrow moves
the cursor forward, and for a right aligned, the right arrow moves the
cursor backward. Then the actual movement of the cursor is relative to the
paragraph alignment: in RTL alignment, traversing RTL text moves the
cursor forward, while traversing LTR moves the cursor backward.

Examples
In a left-aligned paragraph, pressing the right arrow will move the cursor
(|) like this:
|ab אבג cd
a|b אבג cd
ab| אבג cd
ab |אבג cd      OR     ab אבג| cd    (there is ambiguity because the space
character can be both RTL or LTR)
ab א|בג cd
ab אב|ג cd
ab אבג| cd      OR     ab |אבג cd
ab אבג |cd
ab אבג c|d
ab אבג cd|

To help with navigation, the cursor has a line attached to its top showing
which direction it's facing.

Hope this helps.

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 3:42 AM Andy Goryachev <andy.goryachev at oracle.com>
wrote:

> Hi.
>
>
>
> I have a question for people who routinely use right-to-left RTL languages
> (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.):
>
>
>
> *What is your expectation for navigating text using left/right arrow keys
> when the text contains a mixture of RTL and LTR?*
>
>
>
> It looks like there is no standard when it comes to modern applications –
> see a small sample:
>
>
> https://gist.github.com/andy-goryachev-oracle/4802f9380fb03ec2be7ac36bd98a2059
>
>
>
> In javafx, the navigation of bidirectional (bidi) text might have been
> broken sometime after jfx8, and even jfx8 might have issues, see
>
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8296266
>
>
>
> It looks like the most modern applications use logical navigation and
> logical selection (that is, when navigating using left/right arrow keys,
> the cursor position reflects previous/next insertion indexes in the text,
> rather than visual position).  This causes the cursor to change the
> direction of movement when it crosses the bidi boundary.  Would you say
> this is the expected behavior?
>
>
>
> Thank you
>
> -andy
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/openjfx-dev/attachments/20231016/95e2aab1/attachment.htm>