Re: Old Italic and Bidi Mirroring

[Asmus Freytag]

Found this message in my outbox; just sending this out now for completeness.

At 12:47 PM 1/7/02 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
Accordingly, the Old Italic
script has a default directionality of strong left-to-right in this
standard. When directional overrides are used to produce right-to-left
presentation, the glyphs in fonts must be mirrored from the glyphs
shown in the tables below.

Doesn't that mean that we need to have Bidi Mirroring property as 'Y' for
those characters?

It seems that way. However, I am uncomfortable in adding support for 
complex script behavior for any 'dead' script into default properties 
provided by the Unicode Standard.

At least I'd want some more reflection on what (if any) the costs would be 
for such specification to be added.

A./

Old Italic and Bidi Mirroring

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Quoting UAX#27, Unicode 3.1, Section 7.10:

   Directionality. Most early Etruscan texts have right-to-left
   directionality. From the third century BCE, left-to-right texts
   appear, showing the influence of Latin. Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan
   also generally have right-to-left directionality. Boustrophedon
   appears rarely, and not especially early (for instance, the Forum
   inscription dates to 550-500 BCE). Despite this, for reasons of
   implementation simplicity, many scholars prefer left-to-right
   presentation of texts, as this is also their practice when
   transcribing the texts into Latin script. Accordingly, the Old Italic
   script has a default directionality of strong left-to-right in this
   standard. When directional overrides are used to produce right-to-left
   presentation, the glyphs in fonts must be mirrored from the glyphs
   shown in the tables below.

Doesn't that mean that we need to have Bidi Mirroring property as 'Y' for
those characters?

roozbeh