Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > A simple (as in "KISS") strategy that should always work is to copy
  > the entire physical line around the region.

1. Is that physical line sufficient to determine the bidi context for
the region?  I don't know.  If you say it is, I believe you.

2. It would be unclear to include the whole line in the message
if the message is about just part of it (such as, a URL).

So what I am looking for is a way to simplify the rest of that line
into something that would create an equivalent bidi context
for the region to be copied.

  >   Optimizing
  > that would probably require replacing runs of certain types of
  > characters with a single representative character of the same type,
  > and keeping all the directional controls.

  > We could also replace strong directional characters L/R/AL with the
  > corresponding mark (LRM/RLM/ALM), which are displayed as (thin)
  > spaces, and so will be almost invisible, keeping an illusion of
  > copying just the region of text and nothing else.

This sounds like the sort of thing I proposed.

Another possible interface would be
'buffer-substring-preserve-bidi-context'.
It would copy a specified part of the buffer, but prefix and suffix it
with whatever is necessary to cause that part to display the same,
bidi-wise, as it did in its original buffer.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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