From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Jun 20 2005 - 00:59:40 CDT
Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> wrote:
> As an aside, I'm beginning to get confused by the 'order' terminology.
> I use to assume that visual order was the(?) orderly order the eye
> would follow when reading, but that does not seem to be so for RTL
> scripts!
> ...
> I suspect 'logical order' really just means, 'the order we like'.
Most of the time, when I see the term "visual order," the writer really
means "left-to-right," which of course is absurd for Arabic and Hebrew
and such. I consider it a holdover from older computer technologies
that could only display things left-to-right, built by people for whom
LTR was the "normal" reading direction.
I'd prefer to see "visual order" used to mean the direction generally
appropriate for the script -- LTR for Latin, RTL for Hebrew -- but
without reordering or other details that break the normal
directionality. "Logical order" would be similar, but with these
details added. I'm sure an expert in Bengali or Tamil or Khmer could
come up with suitable examples.
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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