Re: Markup for Language (was: Re: Exemplifying apostrophes)

From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Tue May 27 2008 - 23:47:12 CDT

  • Next message: Khaled Hosny: "Re: Markup for Language (was: Re: Exemplifying apostrophes)"

    On 27-May-08, at 8:35 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:

    >
    > 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.

    Oh yes my text editor works perfectly according the Unicode rules. I
    inadvertently diverted your attention to another issue which was not
    my point, by mentioning that I select rtl for the paragraph. I
    actually prefer this ability of manually selecting the directionality
    of the paragraph (first paragraph which goes on until the override)
    to that 'strong' and 'weak' point scheme which is inherently
    unreliable in practical rtl use which is vastly mixed with ltr.
    Besides, if I want to write an rtl paragraph, I want it to be right
    aligned, which is not defined by this 'weak' and 'strong' scheme
    (thankfully!). It may still has an important role in putting a mixed
    text together properly that I don't know, but it's not reliable in
    defining the directionality of the paragraph.
    So I do select the directionality of the paragraph manually. It takes
    care of the right alignment at the same time. Generally rtl user has
    his editor defaulted to rtl. So this manually setting should be
    applied to ltr paragraph until override.
    In this picture, it is explained.

    But my focus was on language not directionality. I'm totally
    satisfied having access in manually setting the directionality. I
    wish I could have the same for language. In the picture, if the text
    was Kurdish instead of Persian, it couldn't be displayed properly if
    it was not recognized as Kurdish.
    Note that manually setting of the language also, if it ever existed,
    could be first selected in the text editor as default, and manually
    changed occasionally.

    Behnam



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 27 2008 - 23:51:02 CDT