gmane.linux.region.israel

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Nadav Har'El — 2008-10-07T20:21:05

On Tue, Oct 07, 2008, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection": When you put it this way, it might not sound very useful, but what if we're talking about part of an hebrew sentence and a piece of punctuation or whitespace that actually belongs to the English part, but you don't know that? When this happens, it's a real annoyance to delete such punctuation because it's hard to "select" it. Just yesterday I was wrestling with this issue although I admit - it's not terribly common. In the common cases (removing just a Hebrew word, etc.) there's simply no difference between visual and logical selection. P.S. "visual selection" is where the highlight displayed on-screen is contiguous, but the characters selected in memory are not, while "logical selection" is where the characters selected in memory are contiguous, while the highlight on screen is not. This is my definitions, and also Doug Felt's in the presentation I pointed to: http://www.m17n.org/conference/m17n2000_all_but_r

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Nadav Har'El — 2008-10-07T20:13:22

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection": Even more than four years ;-) Eight (!) years ago I was in a multilingualization conference in Tsukuba, Japan, presenting Ivrix. Douglas Felt was also there, and presented the issues and solutions of bidi support in Java. One of the issues he discussed, which really sank into my memory, was the issue of caret movement and logical vs. visual selection. You can see his presentation in http://www.m17n.org/conference/m17n2000_all_but_registration/proceedings/felt/index.htm Another presentation was given there on a similar topic by Eli Zaretskii who focused, believe it or not, on the MS-DOS EinsteinWriter (yes, this editor was an antique even at that time ;-)), and how well it treated (in his opinion) cursor movement. I'm not sure Eli's opinions were the same as Doug's: http://www.m17n.org/conference/m17n2000_all_but_registration/proceedings/zaretskii/m17n2000.ps.gz

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T13:33:09

Hi Mati, I think that Omer's proposal is interesting and that we can't prejudge the average joe's reaction to it. There are a lot of features that are harder than this one to understand and to use in OOo. I think that it's worth including in a special or bonus release to see how it will go over. Regards, - yba On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Matitiahu Allouche wrote:

Re: Planning a room using Dia/Kivio

Shlomi Fish — 2008-10-07T13:30:17

I should note that, if all else fails, you can always add the shapes that you require to Dia yourself: http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Faq#head-2bb408b1bae45e4fa80ee73d0de7f2e09f68800e That or hire someone (I'm interested) to do it for you. You can then share these shapes with other people who can re-use them. That's the power of open-source. Regards, Shlomi Fish ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Why I Love Perl - http://xrl.us/bjn88 Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Re: Planning a room using Dia/Kivio

Meir Michanie — 2008-10-07T12:53:20

what about "Sweet Home" ? http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/issues/2008/95/projects_on_the_move job in beds). ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Planning a room using Dia/Kivio

Oren Held — 2008-10-07T12:44:07

Hi, I'm looking for a Linux software for planning a room. MS Visio does a fine job in MS Windows. Dia & Kivio should be the Visio alternatives, but I couldn't find (neither in the software or on the net) shapes for room objects (doors, windows, beds). Any idea? 10x - Oren ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Matitiahu Allouche — 2008-10-07T12:29:20

There are several possibilities for improving the selection GUI look&feel in this case: 1. Turn off BiDi ordering for the entire file (useful by itself for blind computer users; not directly related to our problem). 2. Manually turn off BiDi ordering for a text segment (say, a paragraph) and then manually turn it back on. 3. Use the metaphor of using one hand to straighten out a piece of paper when writing using the second hand (or straightening a piece of cloth while doing needlework): turn off BiDi ordering 5 glyphs before and 5 glyphs after the mouse position (as the mouse moves, we suppress ordering of differing glyphs). Have them displayed with background having different color. (The exact numbers are to be determined by usability tests, and be user-configurable through a setup menu. So is the background color to be used in this case.) 4. Have a small pop-up window, which displays the text around the mouse without BiDi ordering and let the user guide his mouse actions using the pop-up dis

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T08:59:59

[snip] I think that we agree on this. The question is whether a feature like Omer's display order option would make the video behavior of selection a little more "logical". Right. - yba

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T08:45:16

This sounds best to me, possibly with (1) added by double/tripple-clicking or similar signal. We would need to find a way to present this mechanism to blind or just color blind users. Looks complicated to me. Sounds workable, but less simple that just turning off bidi re-ordering for the current paragraph. Pop-up helper windows don't really fit in with the Swing/JavaFX paradigm. It would work in OOo. Excellent point. For Arabic displayed in an LTR context we would have to use the stand-alone glyphs for each character as the joining of the glyphs ("rabt") is inherently RTL. Regards, - yba

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Matitiahu Allouche — 2008-10-07T08:36:30

If you do usability tests, you will generally find that users prefer a visual approach. It is much easier to explain and to understand visual selection than logical selection. This being said, my personal opinion is that visual selection is a wonderfully intuitive way to perform something which most often does not make sense. In the cases where visual selection is different from logical selection, which is when there is text at different levels (different directions) between the starting and ending points, the visual selection groups parts of text which are not logically adjacent. I see little likeliness that a user would want to copy or delete just these parts and not all the text in between. Since logical selection is already implemented, if there are resources to implement visual selection, I would say: add the visual selection but do not remove the code for logical selection, and let the user choose which way (s)he prefers by setting a preference or an environment variable or whatever.

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Omer Zak — 2008-10-07T08:04:58

Hello Jonathan, I think I begin to understand what you are trying to accomplish. It is indeed difficult to precisely select a text segment when there are several spans of different directionality properties (LTR/RTL, strong/weak, overrides, etc.) at its borders. There are several possibilities for improving the selection GUI look&feel in this case: 1. Turn off BiDi ordering for the entire file (useful by itself for blind computer users; not directly related to our problem). 2. Manually turn off BiDi ordering for a text segment (say, a paragraph) and then manually turn it back on. 3. Use the metaphor of using one hand to straighten out a piece of paper when writing using the second hand (or straightening a piece of cloth while doing needlework): turn off BiDi ordering 5 glyphs before and 5 glyphs after the mouse position (as the mouse moves, we suppress ordering of differing glyphs). Have them displayed with background having different color. (The exact numbers are to be determined by usability tests,

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda — 2008-10-07T07:52:49

Hi Nadav, How about transferring the material as a whole to a community server, like hamakor's or iglu's, where other sysadmins will take care of the machine anyhow? As important as the ivrix site was, I doubt it will be a burden on an existing server. Orna. On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Nadav Har'El public.gmane.org> wrote: ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T07:36:48

We agree on the meaning of visual selection. No, we mean temporaroly turn off bidi re-ordering for a text, do a logical selection (which is now the same as visual selection) of some subset and then revert the display of the whole text back to bidi ordering. Selected text wold be always be displayed in the same ordering as the unselected text. - yba

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Nadav Har'El — 2008-10-07T07:32:42

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "[YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection": Unfortunately, the machine hosting ivrix.org.il has crashed over a year ago, and though I do have a replacement, with everything else going on in my life I never had the time or energy to set it up again. I still pay for the domain though ;-) If there's anything you need that used to be on the ivrix site, please let me know and I can send it to you. Sorry, Nadav.

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Omer Zak — 2008-10-07T07:23:32

definition of "visual selection". You drag the mouse from column X to column Y in the same row of the display, and get whatever text which happens to be displayed between those columns (the text could have been from different spans of the corresponding original text - "logical text"). Jonathan, can you clarify if you mean the same thing, or whether you really meant "temporarily turn off BiDi ordering for a selected text segment and display it"? --- Omer On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 09:09 +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T07:19:07

Hi Shachar, If you turn off bidi ordering an display the characters of a mixed text from RTL or from LTR in the order that the characters were entered, then logical text selection is identical to visual selection to the user. This is what Omer suggested. I believe that it would be very helpful to users. Similarly, if you have a purely LTR or a purely RTL run of characters then logical and visual selection are identical to the user. Regards, - yba On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Shachar Shemesh — 2008-10-07T07:09:50

Visual selection, to me, means "selecting text from a continuous block of visually ordered text". If the text is not visually ordered then the selection cannot be considered "visual". I conceded that definitions may vary. I agree with Omer that visual selection does not seem all that useful to me. I am at a loss to think of what use to the end user a selection containing the end of the Hebrew part of a sentence followed by the end of the English part of the sentence is going to be. Same goes for the beginnings of the sentences combined. Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T06:58:57

Right, that's what the qualifier "in effect" means. - yba

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Shachar Shemesh — 2008-10-07T06:52:01

No. It just allows logical selection in a visually consistent way. Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request-NSemkxREmS1YZAO8hgG6+w< at >public.gmane.org

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-07T06:28:50

Hi Omer, The ability to turn off bidi ordering in effect allows visual selection, whether the base direction is RTL or LTR. This might be a good feature to have in any event. Regards, - yba On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Omer Zak wrote:

Re: [YBA] Logical VS Visual Text Selection

Jonathan Ben Avraham — 2008-10-06T17:37:15

We are talking about a very lengthy focus group and marketing research effort, not about springing a new feature on the unsuspecting bidi public. B.C. Beck at Sun and Doug Felt at IBM implemented bidi supoprt in the ICU and Java Swing respectively based on requirements provided by me and Isam Abuteir. That was a four-year effort. - yba On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Omer Zak wrote: