"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Ok, I'll just keep you XEmacs guys informed of what's going on emacs-bidi from time to time. Eli Zaretskii is writing code for the redisplay which will take bidi into account while redisplaying. It is based on UAX#9 but uses a character-by-character-approach just like current Emacs redisplay: Based on the current position in the buffer, the "next" character is fetched. Instead of just incrementing the position, Eli does some scanning, caching, jumping and direction reversing such that the "next" character for redisplay is indeed the next character in visual order (in the window), but not necessarily the next character in logical order (in the buffer). UAX#9 is the Unicode Standard Annex #9 Technical Report and is available at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/. TAKAHASHI Naoto and HANDA Kenichi are writing code to display Arabic from Unicode and ISO-8859-6 correctly. Those encodings use only one character for the various glyphs (start, middle, end, isolated form), so the display code needs to know about some basic Arabic rules to get this right. This is done using font-lock to identify the region of interest and compose-region to compose any number of characters into another character. There's a screenshot available at http://www.m17n.org/ntakahas/arabic.png. I myself am just getting into this. :) At the moment I'm writing code to create categories usable for bidi according to UAX#9. Currently I use one such categories for each bidi type in UAX#9. I use a table derived from UnicodeData.txt (available from www.unicode.org) to get all bidi types for UCS characters, and then I use tables from Dave Love's ucs-tables.el to use this information for all 8859 charsets. I assume that -- as more unification tables from UCS to the various other charsets become available -- the bidi categories can be for more and more charsets. This code is available from the emacs-bidi archives, http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/emacs-bidi/. The next thing on the list is a function to revert the bidi-algorithm: To derive a logical form given the visual form. We assume that such a thing may be valuable when treating text pasted from other applications where the original logical ordering (and all the explicit bidi marks) got lost. Alex. -- http://www.emacswiki.org/