153: Where is an Emacs that can handle Semitic (right-to-left) alphabets? Joel M. Hoffman writes: A couple of years ago a wrote a hebrew.el file that allows right-to-left editing of Hebrew. I relied on the hardware to display the Hebrew letters, given the right codes, but not for any right-to-left support; the hardware also doesn't have to send any specific char. codes. Emacs keeps track of when the user is typing Hebrew vs. English. (The VT-* terminals in Israel contain built-in support for Hebrew.) To get it to work I had to modify only a few lines of GNU Emacs's source code --- just enough to make it 8-bit clean. [and in a separate message:] It doesn't produce time-order ["sefer" format] (I wouldn't recommend trying that with emacs, because converting time-order to screen-order with arbitrarily long lines is a bit tricky), but I also concocted a quick filter to convert screen-order into time-order. I'll be happy to send you the requisite files if you want them. If you're using it for anything large, however, you'll want something that works better. Joel Hoffman has also written a "bi-directional bi-lingual Emacs-like" + editor for MS-DOS named Ibelbe (Itty Bitty Emacs-Like Bidirectional + Editor). Ibelbe is written in Turbo Pascal and comes with source code. + Here is the description: + + Ibelbe looks like emacs (it even has a minibuffer and filename + completion), and fully supports both right-to-left and left-to-right + editing. Other than an EGA monitor or better, no special hardware is + required. You will need an EGA Hebrew font to use Ibelbe with Hebrew. + + Anonymous FTP: + israel.nysernet.org:israel/msdos/{ibelbe,hebfont}.zip + Joseph Friedman has written patches for Emacs 18.55 and 18.58 that provide Semitic language support + under X Windows. Warren Burstein says he has mapped 7-bit keys by modifying self-insert-command "for Hebrew input on 7-bit keyboards". A good suggestion is to query archie for files named with `hebrew'.