Kenneth Whistler wrote at 1:19 PM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004: >TUS 4.0, p. 43 (available online): > >"The historical directionalities are of interest almost exclusively >to scholars intent on reproducing the exact visual content of >ancient texts. The Unicode Standard does not provide direct >support for them. Fixed texts can, however, be written in >boustrophedon or in other directional conventions by using >hard line breaks and directionality overrides." > >That is how it should be handled in Unicode. > >And there is no point in making a Unicode proposal to do otherwise, >as the UTC has shown no interest in treating such multiple >directionality layouts as anything other than concerns for >higher-level protocols.
Thanks for the good and quick reply. The only issue I see about Unicode's position on multiple directionalities, which seems correct, even elegant, for ancient texts where, at least in my kind of work, I am not concerned about line wrapping, is that it could present problems for a MODERN script that exhibited multiple directionalities. I'm just curious - are there any modern scripts with multiple directionalities? And if so, wouldn't Unicode's position here present problems for them? At any rate, I'm happy to not to have to deal with such issues in my Archaic Greek proposal. :-) Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
