GNU bug report logs - #32516
26.1; Reshape Arabic Characters in the Terminal

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From: Naheel Azawy <naheelazawy <at> gmail.com>
To: eliz <at> gnu.org
Cc: 32516 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#32516: 26.1; Reshape Arabic Characters in the Terminal
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 01:25:22 +0300

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Thanks for you quick reply!
Nope, auto-composition-mode didn't help.
But https://github.com/behdad/bicon/pull/20 did!
Now `bicon.bin --reshape-only emacsclient -nw $@` is pretty ok.
It still has some issues but that should be fixed in bicon.

Thanks,

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 9:29 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Naheel Azawy <naheelazawy <at> gmail.com>
> > Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:06:19 +0300
> >
> > The problem occurs in the terminal mode with Arabic characters. Emacs
> > handles the bidirectional text correctly in terms of direction but it
> > doesn't reshape the characters depending on its location. More details
> > can be seen with screenshots on my question in Emacs stack exchange:
> > https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/44144/arabic-in-terminal-mode
> > I have also written a little minor mode as workaround to this problem:
> > https://github.com/Naheel-Azawy/emacs-arabic-reshaper
> > but an actual solution is expected to only render the characters while
> > they're displayed in the screen and not reshape the entire file as I'm
> > doing with my minor mode.
>
> Does it help to turn off auto-composition-mode?
>
> If that doesn't help, then I'm afraid you will have to look for a
> terminal emulator that supports character composition and Arabic
> shaping, but can let you turn off its bidi reordering.  (PuTTY can do
> that, but it's for logging from Windows into Unix systems, so AFAIK
> will not run natively on Posix hosts.)
>
> You see, Emacs supports Arabic shaping by using a shaping engine
> (a.k.a. "font backend") that works with OTF/TTF fonts, which know what
> glyphs are needed to represent a correctly-shaped Arabic letter or
> ligature composed from certain codepoints.  But this only works on GUI
> frames, because on text-mode frames, Emacs just writes the codes of
> the characters to the terminal driver, it cannot specify font glyphs
> to display those characters.
>
> As you have discovered, disabling bidi-display-reordering is not the
> solution, because there's much more to bidi editing support in Emacs
> than just reordering characters for display.  That is why we need
> bidi-aware display engine in Emacs in the first place, and cannot rely
> on external solutions like what exists in Pango etc., or in terminal
> emulators, for that matter.
>
> If BiCon can let you disable its reordering, and still perform
> shaping, then that's your solution.  If it doesn't, then maybe asking
> its developers to provide such a feature, or coding it yourself, is
> the way forward for you and other Arabic-speaking users of text-mode
> frames in Emacs.
>
> Bottom line: this isn't a bug in Emacs, this is how the code was
> designed and supposed to work on TTY frames.
>
> Of course, if someone knows a way to communicate character shaping to
> a terminal driver, we could think of implementing that in Emacs.  But
> does such a protocol exist?
>
> Thanks.
>

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