Re: bidi in Taiwanese Mandarin (was: bidi support)

From: Martin J. Duerst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch)
Date: Mon Jul 14 1997 - 11:04:22 EDT


On Fri, 11 Jul 1997, Te Khaisu wrote:

> Well, I think this is strict bidi like Arabic.
>
> Say there is a Mandarin header, "Jinnian Taiwan GNP dadao 1.2 wan
> Meiyuan" (Taiwan's GNP reached USD 12 000 this year) [amount
> hypothetical], and it is typesetted from right to left. It would appear
> as
>
> [yuan][mei][wan] 1.2 [dao][da] GNP [wan][tai][nian][jin]
>
> I am sure that two of the three biggest selling Mandarin newspapers here
> (China Times, United Daily News) still typeset their headers like this
> (even after the typesetting went computerized).

Sorry for my earlier message today. The above example indeed needs
full BIDI. But it is still a style issue in that this is not needed
for ordinary presentation, i.e. if a browser displays it LTR, people
still can read it.

What seems needed is a feature in a style language (e.g. in CSS) to
change the directionality of some set of characters (in this case
the CJKV ideographs) to something different (in this case from
strong LTR to strong RTL.

Regards, Martin.



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