Re: [office-comment] marking directionality of text inside a paragraph

["Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>]

2011/10/19 Andreas J. Guelzow <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca>:
> On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 12:12 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
>> On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 11:41 -0600, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> > Modern operating environments take care of right-to-left character
>> > ordering, usually without the need for further intervention, so
>> > OpenOffice doesn't need to do much about it (although it probably does
>> > something). The ordering of punctuation, however, is ambiguous, and
>> > without manual settings it is often shown incorrectly. It is
>> > reasonably easy in manually-coded HTML, it is not-so-great in MS-Word
>> > and it is impossible in OpenDocument (unless i am missing something).
>> > I am not familiar with any program that allows to do it with a GUI and
>> > without manual coding.
>>
>> I am still not quite sure why you say it is "impossible in
>> OpenDocument"?
>
> Isn't what you want easily achievable by the insertion of certain
> Unicode control characters in the Unicode string stored in the
> OpenDocument Format file?

Nothing that involves Unicode control characters can be described as "easily".

These control characters were created as last resort for plain text
and not for rich graphical applications like the ones that use
OpenDocument - what the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm calls
"Higher-Level Protocols". Appendix E of OpenDocument points to [UTR20]
as justification for using control characters to manually adjust the
bidirectional display, but this is wrong because [UTR20] clearly says
that these characters are for plain text and should not be mixed with
markup.

> The question of an interface and so of the
> visibility of this of course is a question for the consumers and
> producers of ODF, but that is outside the OpenDocument Format
> specification.

Unicode control characters can also be used to set the direction of a
paragraph. Instead of defining the direction of a paragraph, an
application can put an LRE or RLE character in the beginning of a
paragraph and set the alignment to right or left, as you suggest that
it should do for inline text. This is not what OpenDocument says -
OpenDocument says that it should be an attribute defined in the XML
elements, similarly to the way it is done in HTML. It is good that it
is so, and OpenDocument should go further and define inline
directionality similarly to HTML, too.

HTML is the only standard that i know that gives document authors the
kind of control over text directionality that readers of right-to-left
languages need. OpenDocument should follow it in order to give people
who read and write from right-to-left the support they need - and to
ensure better interoperability with HTML.

[UTR20] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr20/tr20-7.html#Bidi

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬