Re: Old Italic in RTL ??

From: David J. Perry (hospes.primus@verizon.net)
Date: Sun May 31 2009 - 21:18:55 CDT


Since I tested with two different editors and three different fonts, all by
different vendors, about the only thing they have in common is Uniscribe.
Thinking about Uniscribe jogged my memory. The homepage of BabelPad says,
under "Uniscribe Issues," the following:

"Early versions of Uniscribe have a bug that causes it to return to BabelPad
the wrong character position and screen point of Unicode characters outside
of the Basic Multilingual Plane when in Right-To-Left (RTL) mode. This means
that you may be unable to click on or select text composed of characters
from Unicode Planes 1-16 when in RTL layout mode."

I now notice that in Notepad I cannot select any of the Old Italic
characters I enter between the RLO and the PDF (the same ones that appear in
the order I typed, instead of RTL). My version of Uniscribe came with my
relatively new Vista machine and is 1.626.6000.20581, so this is hardly an
"early version." But perhaps that bug has never been quashed??

David

Asmus Freytag wrote:

> This looks like a bug. Contact the vendor.
>
> On 5/31/2009 12:21 PM, David Perry wrote:
>> I want to print some text using the Old Italic characters in RTL mode,
>> mixed in with English. I type the following, where [RLO] is a right to
>> left override and [[PDF] is a pop directional format:
>>
>> English text [RLO]OLD ITALIC[PDF] more English
>>
>> but I get "OLD ITALIC" instead of "CILATI DLO" where OLD ITALIC contains
>> characters in the range U+10300 ff. If I do the same using English
>> instead of Old Italic characters, the text between the RLO and the PDF
>> appears backwards, which I think is exactly what should happen. Given
>> that Old Italic characters are strongly LTR, like the Latin script, why
>> is the behavior different? Is there something special about Plane 1
>> characters? I have tried in Notepad and also BabelPad on Windows Vista,
>> using three different fonts that contain the Old Italic block. (For the
>> record: I know that I also need mirrored shapes for many of the
>> characters, and I can handle that; I just don't understand why the
>> directional marks don't work.)
>>
>> Thanks - David
>>
>>
>>
>



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