From: Richard T. Gillam (rgillam@las-inc.com)
Date: Mon Aug 01 2005 - 14:49:55 CDT
[Sent to wrong place the first time. Apologies to unicode@arabink.com.]
>I would be more than happy to submit or contribute to a proposal for
>the
>following strongly RTL codepoints:
>
> 0123456789
> ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩
> ( ) { } etc. - all brackets
> ' " ` etc.
>
>In short, all digits and weak directionals. This would be a wonderful
>thing for Arabic and Hebrew.
>
>But I get the distinct impression such a proposal would have virtually
>no chance of adoption. Am I overly pessimistic?
No, you're right on. I'm surprised no one else has said it yet, but it seems fairly clear that the problems being cited here are not problems in Unicode; they're problems in the software people are complaining about. The neutrals work just the way you'd expect them to if the underlying paragraph directionality is right to left, provided the software implements the bi-di algorithm correctly and you have a way of specifying the underlying paragraph directionality.
Introducing punctuation with strong RTL directionality would cause lots of problems just to make things easier for users of applications that either don't implement the bi-di algorithm correctly, or that implement it correctly but with a UI that's confusing. On the evidence I've seen so far, it's the applications that need fixing, not Unicode.
--Rich Gillam
Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
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