Subject: bug#51183: lagrange: fribidi and harfbuzz dependencies?

From: Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2021 22:14:19 +0300

On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 07:22:18AM -0800, Christopher Howard wrote:
> Hi, I like the lagrange gemini client, but I have struggled with some
> font display issues since I do a publishing with mixed English and
> Hebrew words. Lagrange does display Hebrew unicode characters, if you
> switch to the selectable "Tinos" font in the preferences, but on my
> system, the Hebrew script is displayed in the wrong direction (left-to-
> right, instead of right-to-left).
> 
> According to the Lagrange github README, Lagrange should be able to
> utilize the fribidi and harfbuzz software to properly display these
> sorts of scripts, but it does not seem to be doing this in Guix, even
> though these packages are available.
> 
> I attempted running lagrange inside "guix environment --ad-hoc fribidi
> harfbuzz" but the scripts are still displaying backwards, suggesting
> that something needs to be modified in the package definition itself to
> utilize this software.
> 
> Here is a simple gemini test page (contain just a single Hebrew word):
> 
> gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/your-word/test.gmi
> 
> On my system, it displays the letters as "bet resh alef" from left to
> right, rather than from right to left.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet
> 

This is something that I've noticed too for years but never got around
to trying to fix. I actually find that mutt displays Hebrew backwards
for me too, as does translate-shell.

I've updated lagrange from 1.5.2 to 1.7.2 and I didn't see any
improvement in how it displays ברא vs ארב.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <[email-masked]>   רנשלפ םירפא
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