On Tuesday, 8 April 2025 at 21:48, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote:
> (The above quoted-quotes from Asmus) > > (this quoted-quote is from me) I'm still getting the hang of mailing lists. Not even sure whether to use plain text or rich text. Thanks for your patience :) I'll be sure to include the quote header from now on. Is it overdoing it to include it on every individual quote? Hmm... On Tuesday, 8 April 2025 at 21:48, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote: > Ah! OK, now we're talking. I see the use case. I haven't read details on the > software in question, but I take it the point is that you're presenting a > route and there's a list of waypoints and it's presented as "And now go from > point A → point B" and needs to be localized/internationalized. This > actually... sounds like a reasonable use? I mean, it makes sense why this > wouldn't be served by the current situation and why people would want > something smarter. Yes! This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about, mirroring arrows are needed for internationalization. Thanks for expressing it better than I apparently did. To be pedantic, while the example you gave of "point A → point B" is a valid one, it's not the one shown in those first two examples. Those examples show a diff after someone edited data. The arrow shows: old value → updated value. In the first issue I linked, I suggested replacing the arrow with U+22B6 ⊶ Original Of, which is a mirroring character, but this suggestion was not taken, or perhaps they didn't see it. Regardless, if the aesthetic they want is an arrow, Unicode shouldn't force them to use a different visual instead just to get the required behavior. > Now that I see your intended situation, I think what I was imagining would > not, in fact, help you. [...] I thought not, but the modifier idea is way better. I am aware of the various directional overrides, and the much more useful directional markers and isolators. Not really sure when overrides are useful, but I'm sure there are some cases - if nothing else, it's useful for English speakers to test bidi unicode behavior! > > I actually love that idea! It would solve the issue for all arrows (and any > > other glyphs in ExtraMirroring.txt), while only introducing one or two new > > code point. Maybe also <NON MIRRORED SELECTOR> to disable mirroring even on > > character with Bidi_Mirroring=Yes. > > And this would work better, if we take it to mean "the character this is > attached to is _subject_ to mirroring." Exactly, thank you for making that clearer. "The character is subject to mirroring" is precisely what's needed. > But markup-type characters in Unicode are a grey area and those which exist > are not widely loved either. As Marcus Scherer writes: [...] Well, lessons you guys have learned in the past is something I'm obviously not going to know. I do believe this kind of control character is a great idea. It's a choice between the control character, the near-duplicate characters, or leaving this use-case unfulfilled. Obviously I don't want the last option, and duplicate characters have their obvious downsides as previously discussed. I don't see any obvious downside to your proposed control character, besides general wariness. > > > I don't even want to know about handling this in TTB contexts... > > > > What is TTB? Couldn't quickly find it. > > Top-To-Bottom. Vertical text. Just one more way for things to be confused. Oh. Well, at least there's not Bottom-To-Top also, right? ... right? - Nitai
