From: Kent Karlsson (kent.karlsson14@comhem.se)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2007 - 17:02:14 CST
Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> > Can't a Hebrew site have a news in Hebrew, with a long quotation of
> > the speech of an American politician in English in an ltr paragraph?
>
> Yes, and Unicode handles it fine, in plain text, without the need for
> support from a markup language (because each Unicode character has a
> direction).
No, that's not the issue. The display of a line of bidi text (with
actual mix of directions) becomes completely different depending on
the top level paragraph direction. That is NOT derived from "each
Unicode character has a direction" (considering just those that
have strong directionality).
The initial poster in this thread gave a good example. But here is a
simpler one, using the convention that uppercase denotes RTL letters.
The *same* input text, logical order "ABCdefGHI", gets the display
CBAdefIHG if the top level direction is LTR (a.k.a. level 0)
IHGdefCBA if the top level direction is RTL (a.k.a. level 1)
The top level paragraph direction is not inherent in the text (and
*cannot* be), though the bidi algorithm specifies a default, but just
a default, usually overriden by markup (or language tag) when markup
(or language tag) is available, since the default is not stable for
editing (unless the editor forces the use of a LRM or RLM char at the
beginning of each paragraph).
/kent k
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