Bidi paragraph direction in terminal emulators (was: Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators)

Richard Wordingham via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sun Feb 3 19:41:07 CST 2019


On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 00:36:23 +0100
Egmont Koblinger via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> I wish to store and deliver the following text, as it's layed out here
> in logical order. That is, the order as the bytes appear in the text
> file, as I typed them from the keyboard, is laid out here strictly
> from left to right, with uppercase standing for RTL letters, and no
> mirroring:
> 
> lorem ipsum ABC <[ DEF foobar

<snip>

> Let's assume that me, as the producer of the text file, wish to create
> a typical README in the spirit of COPYING.GPL and similar text files,
> with the paragraph definition that two consecutive newline characters
> (that is: a single empty line) delimit paragraphs; and a single
> newline is equivalent to a space. Since I'd prefer to keep a margin of
> 16 characters in the source file (for demo purposes), I can take the
> liberty of replacing the space after "ABC" by a single newline. (Maybe
> my text editor does this automatically.) The file's contents, again
> the logical order laid out from left to right, top to bottom, becomes
> this:
> 
> lorem ipsum ABC
> <[ DEF foobar

That split is wrong if you want the non-HTML text to lay out reasonably
well in anything but a higher order protocol forcing RTL.  You need to
it split as:

lorem ipsum ABC
<LTRM><[ DEF foobar

or

lorem ipsum ABC
<ALM><[ DEF foobar

Richard.


More information about the Unicode mailing list