From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed May 12 2004 - 19:05:10 CDT
Elaine asked:
> A lot of the really early Greek (on the true edge
> between Phoenician and Greek) seems to be
> tetradirectional.....or even pentadirectional.
>
> Are you opposed in principle to having small encoded
> blocks which have multiple potential directionalities?
Yes.
The Unicode Standard is a plain text standard, *not* a
text layout standard. See Section 2.9 of The Unicode
Standard, Version 4.0 for what the standard has to say
on this.
The extent of directional layout required of a *plain text*
standard is the bidirectional algorithm, which sorts
out how a (horizontal) *line* of text is laid out when
text of opposite directions is mixed. Beyond that, you
are on to higher level protocols for textual layout.
Those are out of scope for the Unicode Standard.
--Ken
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