rtl help #4588
Replies: 2 comments 13 replies
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@emilyyyylime you write Hebrew no? |
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@Idobenhamo here you go ^^ @Enivex You're right, I was still using typst-lsp so I didn't have the latest features. After updating to tinymist it got fixed |
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Hi @emilyyyylime I'm really interested in hearing more regarding your pessimism about the intractability of having a BiDi oriented programmer's editor. I've actually been working for quite some months now on exactly that idea. It feels to me that the most naive approach - give each line the base direction of its' first character with strong directionality (but allow to quickly toggle), inline math goes into a LRI isolate, inline variable references get a LRM to align the initial hashtag - go a long way. While it is a lot of control characters to type, keyboard macros for them make it convenient. I've been able to get through a year of an Economics major this way very comfortably, so I'm wondering if I missed some important aspect of it. E.g your example (assuming I managed to read it correctly) looks like: While bolting programming features onto a rich text editor base was/is significant work, it seems much easier than trying to get a code editor control to do the correct text shaping and layout. Thanks! |
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holy shit it looks perfect😍 |
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@IgKh it seems for your use you manually insert RTL embedding characters? I suppose that makes sense, but I was talking about a truly native experience, where you wouldn't need to enter any embeddings yourself (and they would not be present in the encoded file, either). Inserting them yourself is a great solution however, and it seems Katvan has a bright future :) |
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Thanks @emilyyyylime, indeed the control characters need to inserted by the user although there are shortcuts in the application to try and smooth it - i.e. Thinking about it, I think that a "truly native experience" isn't impossible. Qt's rich text engine, which implements the BiDi algorithm, has access to the format/style information as well as the text itself. However currently directionality is only a block (paragraph) level format option, and is only used to set the base directionality. I can conceive extending the character level format options to have a directionality attribute too, so that the BiDi algorithm implementation can consider a sequence of characters that have the same attribute as-if they were surrounded by the appropriate LRI/RLI <-> PDI pair. The editor can then set them based on the parsed syntax. But I feel like this is very niche and such a patch won't be accepted upstream to Qt. |
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היי 👋 There’s Katvan by @IgKh, which is a text editor made with special care for the issue of intertwined RTL and LTR segments in Typst. If you like its bare-bones approach, there you go. If like me you prefer to have a fully-fledged text editor at your fingertips, with all the modern goodness, give NeoVim a try. It plays extremely well with LSP (tinymist, and supposedly also typst-lsp which I didn’t try); this upgrades the coding/writing experience remarkably. Anyway, regarding the BiDi matter in question, NeoVim’s approach inherits from Vim’s one, which is like so: either a window¹ is fully LTR, presenting each letter in the order it is encoded in the buffer from left to right, or fully RTL, from right to left. You can map a key combination or sequence to toggle between LTR and RTL modes². It takes some time to change your habits from what you are accustomed to in WYSIWYG editors, browser textboxes and almost everywhere nowadays to a this way of working, but IMHO it is worthwhile in the long run if you are going to type a lot in Typst (or LaTeX for that matter), intertwining RTL and LTR sequences. This way you see directly what appears in the file, unclouded by BiDi algorithms. If needed, you can split a buffer between two windows and set each the other directionality. I wrote my Master’s thesis with this approach, using LaTeX (PDF, source files and meta information), so I can testify for its efficiency with complex BiDi files (a Hebrew linguistic text involving a lot of Old English words and LaTeX commands in my case, not Hebrew Typst’s math, but the principle is the same…). For completion, ages ago I wrote this page; most of what I wrote there is greatly outdated, but the principle of what I wrote about Hebrew there stays true. ¹ In the *Vim sense. ² I use double space, as I (almost) never type two spaces sequentially: vim.keymap.del("n", "<Space><Space>")
vim.keymap.set({ "n" }, "<Space><Space>", function()
vim.opt.rl = not vim.opt.rl:get()
end, { desc = "Toggle directionality" }) |
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And as a side note… 😉
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And this is how the first sentence looks when you show the same buffer in two windows side by side, each with its own directionality.
( |
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I can't seem to compile katvan on my mac, the "libarchive" dependency caused some trouble, and I don't know anything about cmake besides the error messages' guidance. Neovim isn't worth the switch from vscode for me atm. |
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Can’t help you there, sorry. The last time I had a computer with macOS was before it was called ‘macOS’ (or ‘OS X’)… 😛 If you can’t use VS Code and Katvan, and won’t use NeoVim, perhaps Emacs would be a solution. I played a little with modern distros (Doom Emacs and Spacemacs) and they seem impressive. Also here there is a fairly steep learning curve, so I don’t know whether you want to switch to Emacs either, atm. Good luck, anyway! |
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Thanks! Got katvan to work, was indeed a dependency path issue |
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long story short, I've been using typst for school for a few good months now. very satisfied with the language, yet due to me studying in Israel, I gotta use Hebrew (rtl). The thing is, neither the web app or vscode support proper rtl text editing, and it doesn't seem to change anytime soon. Any suggestions? Stuff like msword seems horrible for math compared to typst, and I'm willing to give up the visual aspect.
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