Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.
> A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.
Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality.
Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.
If you are using plain text and don't have access to HTML or CSS markup, you can follow the RTL character with U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK to achieve the same effect. And even if you do have access to those things, using U+200E ensures that operations that strip markup (like copy-paste) don't break your text.
We need to force the entire world to switch to Esperanto written in pure ASCII for reduced carbon emissions from glyph layout algorithm overhead and peace and unity.
But I'd also like a word with them. Or anyone else who might have a suggestion for "required reading". I'd like to think I know better than to use ascii art when it might flow into rtl text, but I wonder what other assumptions I've made that I should be aware are assumptions.
Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality.
Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.
But I'd also like a word with them. Or anyone else who might have a suggestion for "required reading". I'd like to think I know better than to use ascii art when it might flow into rtl text, but I wonder what other assumptions I've made that I should be aware are assumptions.