Re: Highlighting rectangles?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 15:23:43 -0500
> 
> Eli also pointed out:
> > FWIW, we might need something like that anyway for the bidirectional
> > support.  That's because a portion of the display that looks
> > contiguous on the screen might not be contiguous in the buffer (due to
> > logical-to-visual reordering).
> 
> I never thought about this (good old latin-only mindset).  Is it more
> natural for people to select text based on its visual representation
> (i.e. a contiguous part of the display but a non-contiguous part
> of the buffer) or based on its underlying representation (i.e. a
> contiguous piece of buffer, but a set of non-contiguous parts of
> the display).

It's not clear yet.  Generally, I'd expect users to refrain from
selecting a region that is non-contiguous either in the buffer or on
the screen (that would generally mean the selected text doesn't make
much sense), but borderline cases _are_ possible, and we will need to
do something sensible.

There was a long discussion about that on emacs-bidi mailing list,
and the results were inconclusive.  To me, that means we will have to
support such a possibility, because it's not clear that it will not
be needed.