At 12:07 +0100 2001-12-29, Stefan Persson wrote: >Someone said that Unicode contains switches for LTR & RTL. By adding >switches for TTB and BTT this problem could be solved. It would also be >necessary to define a priority order (i.e. which of them that should come >first). > >As an alternative solution, the current switches could be considered LTR, >TTB and RTL, TTB. Then 6 other code points would be necessary for the other >directions.
I can't imagine this working for Egyptian or Mayan, or indeed Mongolian or Ogham. Mongolian and Ogham, when mixed with Latin text, are traditionally written LTR (sometimes Mongolian is RTL). It isn't normal or natural to do otherwise. Egyptian LTR or RTL is not problematic. But for columnar display, in current applications, markup is used. Mayan writes LTR or RTL in repeated columns of two, as I recall. I strongly suspect markup is required for this behaviour. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
