🚀 go-pugleaf

<lunch>

This discussion started in fa.info-mac; I presume the appropriate gateways
will carry it back to arpaland...

Most Mac applications do their text entry through the Text Edit (TE) toolbox
routines -- there is very little motivation to roll your own, since the TE
stuff is very easy to interface to, and (as with most of the toolbox
packaages) the programmer can filter what goes to the TE package.  The
alternative is to bite off a lot of the headaches TE handles so nicely
(left/right/center justification, optional wordwrap, memory management, mouse
sensing, window updates etc.) and do your own text drawing directly
with Quickdraw (QD).

Unfortunately, TE (and indeed the QD text routines) have a strong left-to-right
bias: the DrawChar routine takes the current pen position as the left end
of the baseline, and moves the pen to the right end of the baseline after
drawing the text.  It may be that a fairly simple left/right swap in ALL the
appropriate places would do the trick, but a LOT of (ROM resident!) routines
are going to be affected.  My guess would be that even Macs designated for
sale in Tel Aviv will probably NOT have such modifications.

The other possibility is that this could be worked into the non-volatile RAM
as a control-panel option to affect QD, TE, and whatever else cares.
Whether Apple would consider it worth their while is another question...

=Ned=