At 02:39 PM 12/29/01 +0100, Philipp Reichmuth wrote: >Admittedly, some directions are >rather arcane, but believe me, it will be possible to dig up some >ancient document or other which is written into any odd combination of >directions. If Unicode wants to achieve complete representation of any >kind of presentation of text direction here, it's going to be a pretty >rough job.
Unicode happily settles for covering the must-have common cases for modern text, in particular those that are needed for modern plain text. One of the reasons vertical text support has been left out of Unicode is that modern *plain* text in the languages in question usually is presented left-to-right horizontally, whereas bidirectional plain text cannot be presented without explicit support. Already with bidi, the support for the explicit directionality - required for plain text - is in danger of colliding with markup solutions for the same functionality. The 32 directions from the Omega example belong in markup - not plain text. A./ PS: as far as ancient writing is concerned, we clearly need a common markup solution for "capturing the way things look in the original", which can be based on the plain-text backbone provided by Unicode. The Text Encoding Initiative (at http://www.tei-c.org/ ) produces The TEI Guidelines: "detailed recommendations for the encoding of all kinds of textual material of all kinds in all languages from all times".
