E. Keown wrote:
fantasai wrote:
This is a shortcoming in Unicode BIDI: it currently
only represents horizontal directionality, not
vertical directionality.
So, does this mean that in 3 years there might be
vertical bidi?
I once met a guy from Nashua who told me that his
research group (HP?) thought that the most horrible
problem would be putting Chinese and Hebrew text on
the same screen....EK
Chinese and Hebrew isn't that bad. You can use horizontal
BIDI to get the right ordering for sideways text and ignore
BIDI to get the right ordering for upright text. Chinese
and English, imo, is a worse problem.
http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/directions/diagrams/china
(context: http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/vertical-bidi )
Notice that in B, the Chinese and the English are going
in opposite directions, even though they're both LTR scripts.
Another problem is mixing Arabic with Chinese and having both
of them read down. Because shaping happens after reordering [1],
you need to use BIDI to get the shapes, but not use BIDI when
you're actually ordering the text....
[1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#Shaping
~fantasai
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