FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Right-to-left writing

[Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>]

Hello Niklas,

It could be that (the Haiku) TextView makes some unfortunate assumptions 
about text direction, but actually that is a responsibility of BFont. IIRC, 
there are methods in BFont, which tell you the direction. As far as Haiku 
is concerned, the text rendering needs to be improved a lot. It only 
supports one type of glyph spacing, while BFont knows about four or so 
(B_BITMAP_SPACING, B_CHAR_SPACING...). I didn't bother at all with thinking 
about right->left or bottom->top text rendering. I didn't know of a way to 
test it, and I have basically no clue about it. I thought to myself, if 
someone with the knowledge about proper text rendering is desperate enough, 
then he should do it. :-)

That being said, if you can test this on Haiku and it doesn't work, I can 
at least try to help you to get it work properly.

However, in pretty much any application, text rendering is done with the 
BView::DrawString() method. It get's provided a "starting point" of the 
text. In any of my own code, and virtually all code I came across from 
other people, the point is calculated to be on the left side of the string. 
So I would assume that even if we made the necessary changes in the Haiku 
app_server, I'm afraid all applications would need to be adjusted. Or some 
smart trick invented. Or, of course, I might be talking non-sense because I 
just don't have enough of a clue. :-)

Best regards,
-Stephan