Re: [office] Bi-directional text.

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera@zmsl.com>]

Lars Oppermann wrote:
> You can have LTR text in a RTL paragraph by using left-to-right-mark and 
> right-to-left-mark or RTL/LTR-embedding unicode characters in the text.

What part of the spec specifies this? I just did a search and there 
aren't any instances of the strings "right-to-left" or "left-to-right" 
on the spec. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by RTL-embedding 
unicode. I understand that unicode alone is not supposed to tell you teh 
writing direction. Not long ago I and others got an email from Jonathan 
Ben Avraham, from the Israel delegation at ISO. In brief, he said that 
there needs to be an attribute for writing direction and that character 
encoding is no good. I found a copy of his email:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.region.israel.ivrix.discuss/1205


> I can see, how the same can be done with direction-attributes for 
> span-elements. Nevertheless, the current solution works and I am not 
> aware of any use-cases not covered by it. Do you know of any?

Jonathan's email says that character encoding is not enough (I don't 
know if what you described is character encoding). I can't really say if 
the present situation is enough, because I can't find the portions of 
the spec that you are referring to.

I notice that when ODF was approved at ISO a lot of comments were about 
insufficient Bidi support. Do you think this is because the ISO members 
didn't realize which parts of the spec gave proper bidi support?

Best,
Daniel.
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