[Kde-pim] Composer in trunk does not do BiDi

[Shai Berger]

Hi kde-pim developers,

This is my first post to this list. I am a software developer living in 
Israel, and lately I have found some time to meddle in KDE development, 
something which I've long wanted to do. I have been a KDE user for more than 
seven years, and kde-pim applications -- in particular kmail -- have been a 
large part of the reason for this.

I write to the list because I found what seems to be a regression in KMail's 
composer in trunk, with respect to bidirectional writing. in KMail 1.9.6, if 
I start a paragraph in Hebrew (which is written right-to-left), composer 
immediately does the right thing (aligns it right, and displays it as a RTL 
paragraph). In the trunk version, this does not happen, and I could not even 
find a way to tell the composer that a paragraph is RTL.

To make this clear, I uploaded images:

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7015/kmailcurrentam9.png is what the 
composer looks like today, when writing a message containing a paragraph in 
English (LTR) and one in Hebrew (RTL). This is good.

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/4283/kmailbadup4.png is what the composer 
in trunk looks like, with the same message. This is bad. Actually, it is 
beyond bad: For Hebrew users, this is a showstopper. 

As those of you who touched bidi issues are probably aware, it is not just 
alignment: if you look closely, you'll see that the punctuation (ellipsis) 
appears to the right of the text in the new version. In the old one, it is to 
the text's left, where it should be.

I found this while trying to fix https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134036 . 
I've uploaded a patch there, and I would appreciate your feedback and/or 
attention to that also, but the problem I'm reporting in this mail seems to 
me much more important.
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