Unable to display Hebrew correctly on Mac OS/X

[Ron Aaron]

I just recently started working on the Mac, and naturally ported over
my gvim scripts.

When I edit a Hebrew (not even vowelled) text, the drawing is simply
bad. It is very reminiscent of a similar problem which occurred in
Windows XP, where the OS decided how to draw and messed up the "rl"
drawing.

I think that is also happening for me on Mac (the same text look just
fine on Linux or Windows gvim).

Editing a text file shows garbled characters. However, moving the
cursor one character at a time over the text, causes it to be drawn
correctly.

Is there some option I missed out on?

[Tony Mechelynck]

You may try to change your 'guifont', or use the Ctrl-L (redraw)
Normal-mode command. Other than that...

Best regards,
Tony.
--
If you don't get everything you want, think of
everything you didn't get and don't want.

[Ron Aaron]

I've tried all four 'monospaced' fonts on the Mac, and I get exactly
the same results. Each word is drawn in reverse, e.g. it shows as
"ABC" instead of "CBA", but the position in the sentence is correct.

I find it hard to believe I'm the only person who has seen this
behavior on Mac. In any case, I'm certain it must be do to the OS
helping out. My OS is: Mac OS X 10.5.5, if that's relevant to the
discussion.

I'm not too keen to start dissecting the os_macosx.c ...

Best,
Ron

[Tony Mechelynck]

Vim doesn't display true-bidi. With a "normal" (non-bidi) terminal, or
in the GUI, you'll see the contents of each window displayed either all
RTL or all LTR depending on the setting of the window-local 'rightleft'
setting. This means that in mixed text you'll either see Latin script
the right way and Hebrew script reversed, or the opposite -- your
choice, and you can even have two windows with opposite directionality
on a single file. I thought you knew all this.

If you are using Console Vim in a true-bidi terminal, you should ":set
norightleft termbidi" to tell Vim that the terminal is in charge of
bidirectionality. Or at least when editing Arabic; I'm not sure how this
option applies to Hebrew. I'm also not sure how the display of the text
cursor is affected by this option.

Best regards,
Tony.
--
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank?"
-- Bertold Brecht

[Ron Aaron]

On Mar 24, 1:44 pm, Tony Mechelynck <antoine.mechely...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Vim doesn't display true-bidi. With a "normal" (non-bidi) terminal, or
> in the GUI, you'll see the contents of each window displayed either all
> RTL or all LTR depending on the setting of the window-local 'rightleft'
> setting. This means that in mixed text you'll either see Latin script
> the right way and Hebrew script reversed, or the opposite -- your
> choice, and you can even have two windows with opposite directionality
> on a single file. I thought you knew all this.

Em, yes, I'm well aware of all this, I've been using vim with bidi
text for many years now.

Again: I am using GUI vim, not Console vim. The 'termbidi' option
doesn't apply.

The problem seems to be related to the ATSUI renderer, at least there
are some hints in 'gui_mac.c' that indicate this might be true. It
may be a good thing to set "kATSULineDirectionTag" so the drawing
occurs correctly, but I don't know enough about Mac GUI to know what
to do exactly.

If noone else chimes in with helpful information, I'll try to fix it
myself.

[björn]

Hi Ron,

2009/3/24 Ron Aaron:

>
> Again: I am using GUI vim, not Console vim.  The 'termbidi' option
> doesn't apply.
>
> The problem seems to be related to the ATSUI renderer, at least there
> are some hints in 'gui_mac.c' that indicate this might be true.  It
> may be a good thing to set "kATSULineDirectionTag" so the drawing
> occurs correctly, but I don't know enough about Mac GUI to know what
> to do exactly.
>
> If noone else chimes in with helpful information, I'll try to fix it
> myself.

You are not telling us which version of Vim you are using but by the
sounds of it you are using the outdated Carbon port. There is a newer
port called "MacVim" which can be downloaded here:

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

I have also CCed this post to the vim_mac mailing list which is a more
appropriate list for Mac specific problems.

Please let me know how MacVim copes with your situation: if it doesn't
work I'll look into it as soon as I get a chance.

Björn

[Ron Aaron]

Hi, Björn -

I'm using the latest vim - 7.2.148, with some additional patches of my
own. Is the "MacVim" base totally separate from the main vim?

I'll try the MacVim port and see how it fares, thanks.
Ron

[Tony Mechelynck]

On 24/03/09 13:17, Ron Aaron wrote:
>
> Hi, Björn -
>
> I'm using the latest vim - 7.2.148, with some additional patches of my
> own. Is the "MacVim" base totally separate from the main vim?

IIUC, the MacVim base is basically the main Vim base, with some
Mac-specific patches which never made it into Bram's sources. However
some of the Mac people might expain it better than I can.

Best regards,
Tony.
--
Q: How many heterosexual males does it take to screw in a light bulb
in San Francisco?
A: Both of them.

[björn]

2009/3/24 Tony Mechelynck:

>
> On 24/03/09 13:17, Ron Aaron wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Björn -
>>
>> I'm using the latest vim - 7.2.148, with some additional patches of my
>> own.  Is the "MacVim" base totally separate from the main vim?
>
> IIUC, the MacVim base is basically the main Vim base, with some
> Mac-specific patches which never made it into Bram's sources. However
> some of the Mac people might expain it better than I can.

Yes, MacVim works just like any other GUI port in that it hooks into
the various gui_mch_*() calls. The big difference is that MacVim
spawns one Vim process for each GUI-window and uses another process
(MacVim) to coordinate everything in order to be able to support
multiple GUI-windows. More details concerning the source code can be
found in src/MacVim/README. Note that there are some modifications to
the Vim codebase in the MacVim repo but these are intentionally few --
the bulk of the MacVim specific code resides in src/MacVim.

Björn