From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Tue May 27 2008 - 19:35:19 CDT
Behnam <behnam dot rassi at gmail dot com> wrote:
> But to clarify what I meant, if for instance I wanted to write the
> above quoted paragraph in Hebrew, I could select the directionality
> of the paragraph first, then type *all I'm asking is to identify this
> as 'Hebrew'* -in Hebrew of-course.
> It is already identified as 'rtl'. I didn't write an html markup to
> do this. I should be able to identify it as Hebrew as well.
> Now if I start a text with an English paragraph introducing a Kurdish
> text, which would follow in the next paragraph, the first paragraph
> would be defined as English and the second as rtl and Kurdish.
Are you sure this doesn't already work for mixed English and Kurdish --
at least in clean, straightforward cases like the one you describe --
without the need for RLE and other directional overrides, or other
special control characters or markup? And if it doesn't work, are you
sure it's not because of some shortcoming in your editor or word
processor or browser?
Each Unicode character has a number of properties, one of which is
directionality. A character may be strongly LTR or RTL, weakly LTR or
RTL, neutral, and so forth. There is an entire Unicode Standard Annex
written to describe the way this works:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/
There are edge cases where you need the directional overrides, and more
importantly there are display engines that don't understand Unicode
bidirectionality, but in most cases it should be possible to write
ordinary visible characters and let the display engine format them
correctly.
-- Doug Ewell * Arvada, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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