Re: [docbook-apps] Writing mode, xsl-fo output

[maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu>]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2011 20:38:13 +0100, Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk>
wrote:
> I think I would rather specify what I'm writing rather than
> leave it to the code point.
> 
> Although I'm unsure who / what would do that? The formatter?

There's a general DocBook attr @dir, see:
   http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ref-elements.html
For spans of text within e.g. a paragraph, you might use this attr on a
<phrase>.

That said, I'm not sure how well the formatting tools use this.  We use
dblatex, and I don't recall how well this attr is supported; there's this
comment in the file dblatex-0.3/xsl/common/l10n.xsl:  

   <!-- FIXME: This is sort of hack, but it was the easiest 
        way to add at least partial support for dir attribute
   -->

There are also two Unicode chars for this purpose, see:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/H34.html

In our own grammar work, we have added a few elements in our DocBook
localization for text in right-to-left languages, which of course
necessitated our writing some special XSLT code for the conversion to
XeTeX.

   Mike Maxwell