Re: Multiple Writing Directions in One Script

From: rosennej@qsm.co.il
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 15:06:19 CDT

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    ('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is) Dean,

    I believe this is a common misunderstanding. For these cases we do not
    require Unicode bidi support, it is only needed to cope with mixed
    directionality, as is common in modern Hebrew and Arabic.

    Just laying out the text from right to left or from top to bottom is not
    a plain text issue, although you could use the Unicode LRO/RLO formatting
    characters.

    In HTML, you could use <bdo dir=xyz> to force a piece of text to be layed
    out right to left or left to right irrespective of the properties of the
    characters involved. There is no technical or other reason not to add
    boustrophedon, if anyone would wish to finance it or to do it for free
    for Mozilla.

    Jony

    On Tue, 25 May 2004 15:15:31 -0400 Dean Snyder wrote:

    > Archaic Greek could be written right-to-left, left-to-right, or
    > boustrophedon.
    >
    > I'm asking for technical advice as to how such variability in writing
    > direction streams in the same script can be, and should be, handled in
    > Unicode, and how it should be dealt with in a Unicode proposal.
    >
    >
    > Respectfully,
    >
    > Dean A. Snyder
    >
    > Assistant Research Scholar
    > Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
    > Computer Science Department
    > Whiting School of Engineering
    > 218C New Engineering Building
    > 3400 North Charles Street
    > Johns Hopkins University
    > Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
    >
    > office: 410 516-6850
    > cell: 717 817-4897
    > www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
    >
    >
    >
    >



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