Re: Directionality Standard

From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2008 - 19:24:27 CST

  • Next message: Murray Sargent: "RE: Directionality Standard"

    On 9-Jan-08, at 6:54 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    > Waleed Oransa wrote:
    >> It's very important that the Unicode standard encode
    >> the original direction in the Bidi text. (...)
    >> The missing of a standard way to encode the directionality
    >> of the text (...)
    >
    > I tend to disagree with those statements. Unicode already offers
    > the proper
    > encoding for allowing all this, using Bidi embedding controls. They
    > are
    > enough for the intended purpose.

    Is it enough really?
    You are right that alignment of the text or directionality of the
    whole text may not be of Unicode concern.
    But paragraph directionality of rtl scripts are inseparable from
    their Unicode text encoding.
    The question is not whether a paragraph can be set in rtl. The
    question is whether this paragraph should be encoded that way, and
    stay that way, as a Unicode standard.

    An rtl paragraph can not be anything else, wherever it goes. This is
    what I have such a hard time to make understand to non rtl users. It
    isn't about page layout design. It's about preserving the integrity
    of the text itself, as it was written by the writer.

    This is absolutely a Unicode issue because it is about the standard
    of encoding an rtl paragraph in a way that it preserves its integrity
    wherever it goes. I don't know if it was a lack of clarity or total
    absence of guideline about directionality standard. But clearly this
    can not be left to applications and different formats to interpret at
    their convenience. This is about the Unicode standard encoding of an
    rtl paragraph. Shouldn't there be a mandatory standard for preserving
    rtl integrity?

    Behnam



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