From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Fri Aug 17 2007 - 09:56:58 CDT
Behnam wrote:
> What makes quotation marks any different than other mirroring
> characters in BiDi context? if it's only backward compatibility, it's
> not good enough for maintaining or removing mirroring property from
> one character or the other.
> Mirroring property was a bad idea from the start and as long as the
> position of cursor is well defined within a BiDi context, the writer
> knows which character he or she wants to use to open or close.
> This property should be removed from all characters such
> as parentheses and brackets etc. as well. Backward compatibility is
> just a matter of 'find and replace' if need be.
> Get rid of mirrors all together. It's a bad idea.
>
> Now Hebrew script might be interested in mirroring property for
> question mark, comma, and semicolon!
Actually, Hebrew writers and typesetters in general do not reverse these
punctuation marks. I have occasionally seen reversed commas used in
Hebrew, but more often they are left exactly as they are, which means,
of course, that they lean *forward* at the bottom, instead of backward
as they do in LTR languages. And the question mark certainly is left
alone, once again making it open "ahead" instead of back into the text
as in LTR languages. Arabic, on the other hand, does have a
mirror-reversed question mark, U+061F ARABIC QUESTION MARK, and a
distinctive comma that isn't really just a flipped or rotated Latin
comma (though it is obviously related. But it's too big and printed in
the middle of the line): U+0606 ARABIC COMMA.
Actually, I think mirroring isn't such a great idea too, but I don't
think we can reasonably remove it from brackets and parens at this
point. Anything can be justified by "find and replace" for backward
compatibility; Unicode has been around too long to do this, already.
~mark
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