From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Oct 31 2004 - 11:05:43 CST
fantasai <fantasai dot lists at inkedblade dot net> wrote:
> kefas wrote:
>> Inserting unicode/basic-hebrew reults in a convinient
>> RtL, right-to-left, advance of the cursor, but the
>> space-character jumps to the far right. Is there a
>> RtL-space?
>> In MS-Word and OpenOffice I can only change whole
>> paragraphs to RtL-entry. But quoting just a few
>> words in hebrew WITHIN a paragraph would be helpful to
>> many.
>> Related: The other Hebrew characters in the alphabetic
>> presentation forms insert themselves in LtR-fashion?
>> Why this difference?
>> I read about Logical and Visual entry, but don't see
>> how that answers my 2 questions above.
>
> If you're going to quote an rtl phrase in an ltr context,
> you want to use an embedding. In plaintext, this would
> mean putting an RLE (U+202B) character before the phrase
> and a PDF (U+202C)after it. (In HTML, you'd enclose the
> text in an element and set its 'dir' attribute to 'rtl'.)
It shouldn't be necessary to use directional overrides just to display a
Hebrew passage within English text. There is a Unicode Bidirectional
Algorithm that describes how LTR and RTL scripts should behave in
situations like this. It has been part of Unicode, in some form or
another, since Appendix A of Unicode 1.0.
In particular, the normal space U+0020 is supposed to inherit LTR or RTL
directionality depending on surrounding characters, and the Hebrew
presentation forms at U+FBxx are supposed to behave just like the "real"
Hebrew letters at U+05xx when it comes to directionality (they are all
marked "R").
When you are typing in Word or OpenOffice (or SC UniPad, for that
matter), the space stays on the right because the software doesn't know
whether the next letter you type is going to be LTR or RTL, and
apparently assumes it will be LTR. When you type another Hebrew letter,
the directionality of the space is resolved, and displays correctly.
That is why there is no "RTL space," because U+0020 is neither LTR nor
RTL, but depends on its environment.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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