$Id: README,v 1.3 1992/06/04 16:34:10 yossi Exp $

		       Semitic Patches to Emacs
		by Joseph Friedman (yossi@DEShaw.COM)
			     June 4, 1992


This directory contains the patches necessary to edit text in Semitic
languages using GNU Emacs 18.58 under X11:

1) A simple, fixed, Hebrew X screen font, modified from misc/6x13.
   Also, I included the accompanying line in the fonts.alias file.
   (I have donated heb6x13 and another font, heb8x13, to the MIT X
   Consortium, and these fonts are included in Release 5 of X11, so
   you may already have it on your system.)

2) Patches for the source code and lisp code for GNU Emacs 18.58 that
   do right-to-left display and editing, as well as my own version of
   256-character fonts support.

3) A simple lisp package, hebrew.el, which selectively maps the
   workstation keyboard into a standard Hebrew keyboard.  This mapping
   is done both in insertion and in searching (sorry, I haven't
   implemented replacing yet, but it'll come soon.)

The basic idea:
--------------
To summarize the changes to the C code, I created two new buffer-local
variables, display-literal and display-reversed.  When display-literal
is non-nil, nonprintable characters in the buffer are NOT mapped into
ctl-arrow or backslash-and-three-octals; instead, whatever is in the
font entry is displayed as is (don't do this at home!  On a non-X
display, this can really mess up the screen).  When display-reversed
is non-nil, all the windows showing the current buffer are flipped
laterally, so the beginning of the line appears on the right and the
lines are wrapped (or truncated) on the left;  all the editing command
continue to behave as they were before.  The default value for both
these variables is nil, so Emacs and Epoch behave exactly like the
non-semitic version unless you specifically request otherwise.

Installation:
------------
1) Start with the font.  Unpack the font using:

		uudecode thefont
		uncompress heb6x13.bdf.Z

   then run bdftosnf on heb6x13.bdf and install heb6x13.snf wherever
   you keep your local fonts.  Run mkfontdir in that directory, and
   then append the enclosed fonts.alias to your fonts.alias file.
   You're all set.  Just to be sure, try:

		xfd -fn heb6x13

2) Now apply the patches.  Apply patch-src in the source directory
   and patch-lisp in the lisp directory.  When patching the lisp files,
   don't forget to delete the corresponding .elc files, since they have
   precedence over .el files.

3) Next, copy hebrew.el to your local lisp directory.

4) You're almost ready to use the package.  Now comes the REALLY HARD
   part---making little labels with the hebrew characters on them and
   taping these labels on the front of the keys on the keyboard :-(

Have fun!  And please report any problems/bugs/suggestions to me.

-yossi