OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

In 15.5.36 Writing Mode this is written;
The style:writing mode attribute specifies the writing mode of a 
paragraph. The attribute is similar to the writing-mode attribute 
specified in §7.27.7 of [XSL], 

Writing modes basically are things like left-to-right or right-to-left 
etc.

This writing mode is referenced from paragraph-styles, from 
section-formatting properties, table properties, Frame formatting 
properties and Page formatting properties.

The fact that this is referenced from paragraph-styles indicates that we 
store a text direction in the style.  Doing this means that when we apply 
a style to a certain text we specify if its RTL or LTR text.  And this is 
a behavior I find wrong.
The actual text in the paragraph can be used, in combination with unicode 
tables, to determine the text layout direction but that is no longer 
possible due to the style always overriding this value.

Imagine the following use case;
A user types some text in Hebrew. The word processor detects it is RTL 
text and thus sets the paragraphs text-layout to be rl-tb.
The user then applies a paragraph style 'Header1' to the paragraph. But 
this paragraph style has the layout-direction set to 'left-to-right' and 
thus my Hebrew text is now left-aligned. Which is wrong.
You could argue that the paragraph style should then be altered to be 
right-to-left, but that means I can't use it anymore with BIDI or 
left-to-right paragraphs anymore.

I would like to suggest we add an 'auto' value to the above list of 
options which would take the value from the text instead of specifying 
this.
I would strongly suggest making this the default value in 1.2 for when no 
direction is specified in the xml. The reason is simple; in normal (i.e. 
not automatic) styles specifying a layout direction is something that is 
hardly ever useful as the user doesn't want to specify the direction 
before starting to type the text.

Backwards compatibility:
Looking at the biggest 2 implementors of ODF I see that both of them 
currently ignore the writing mode for text alignment completely; see
http://testsuite.opendocumentfellowship.org/testcases/TextContents/textFormatting/alignment/TestCase.html
So, as both of them are not really implementing this part of the spec 
anyway, I don't see any problems with backwards compatibility when 
changing this.

-- 
Thomas Zander

On 13/06/07, Thomas Zander 

On Thursday 14 June 2007 08:52:11 you wrote:
> On 13/06/07, Thomas Zander 

In my ignorance, I'm going to back out of this debate.
My position is the XSL-FO spec was written by people fully appreciative
of the delicacy of writing mode (lr-tb etc).
I'd prefer ODF to follow that model rather than invent new ones.

A couple of comments Thomas.

On 14/06/07, Thomas Zander 

On Thursday 14 June 2007 14:21:27 Dave Pawson wrote:
> In my ignorance, I'm going to back out of this debate.
> My position is the XSL-FO spec was written by people fully appreciative
> of the delicacy of writing mode (lr-tb etc).
> I'd prefer ODF to follow that model rather than invent new ones.

I think it warrents clarification that the difference between text styles 
in ODF and XSL is that XSL is for already written text and styles are to 
be used for a word processor while the user is writing that text.
Its about defaults for that new text.
As soon as the text is actually typed the XSL model is 100% followed.

-- 
Thomas Zander

Hi Thomas,

On Thursday, 2007-06-14 14:02:38 +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:

> And I have to say I didn't even find any way to alter the directionality 
> of a paragraph in OOWriter, so don't try things on that app unless you 
> already know how to do such things ;)

Paragraph style tabpage Alignment, the text direction property. It is
available only if you activated CTL support under
Tools.Options.LanguageSettings.Languages.

> As an end user I can expect certain workflows.  If the text-direction is 
> set on a page, then I think we can expect the new paragraph to get that 
> text direction.

I think it does in OOoWriter unless you explicitly set it to LTR or RTL.
The default value is "use superordinate object settings", resulting in
style:writing-mode="page".

> Even if the first character typed is different. This 
> makes sense for 1 English sentence in a further Hebrew text.
> On the other hand, there are cases where I want the application to be free 
> to deduct the text direction from the text typed. And this usecase is 
> currently impossible. We need an 'auto' directionality for that.

But we do have 15.5.37 "Automatic Writing Mode"
style:writing-mode-automatic

Sounds like what you were looking for, doesn't it?

  Eike

-- 
 OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

On Friday 15 June 2007 18:31:42 Eike Rathke wrote:
> > On the other hand, there are cases where I want the application to be
> > free to deduct the text direction from the text typed. And this
> > usecase is currently impossible. We need an 'auto' directionality for
> > that.
>
> But we do have 15.5.37 "Automatic Writing Mode"
> style:writing-mode-automatic
>
> Sounds like what you were looking for, doesn't it?

Hmm, so if I have a paragraph style with;
  style:writing-mode="lr"
as well as
 style:writing-mode-automatic="true"

then for a new paragraph the writing mode is ignored and the application 
gets to redefine it for a new paragraph based on content.

Ok, sounds a bit weird to my ears, but thats ok :)
Yes, I do think that is fully suited for my needs. Thanks for the pointer 
Elke!
-- 
Thomas Zander

Hi Thomas,

On Sunday, 2007-06-17 23:13:56 +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:

> > But we do have 15.5.37 "Automatic Writing Mode"
> > style:writing-mode-automatic
> 
> Hmm, so if I have a paragraph style with;
>   style:writing-mode="lr"
> as well as
>  style:writing-mode-automatic="true"
> 
> then for a new paragraph the writing mode is ignored and the application 
> gets to redefine it for a new paragraph based on content.

Actually, when reading 15.5.37, it gave me the impression that the
"auto" value isn't only for new paragraphs, but also for already
existing paragraphs, and the additional style:writing-mode attribute is
only there to provide a hint to those applications that don't know ho to
determine the writing mode from content.

> Ok, sounds a bit weird to my ears, but thats ok :)
> Yes, I do think that is fully suited for my needs. Thanks for the pointer 
> Elke!

Hey, please don't change my gender ;-)

  Eike

-- 
 OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS