Re: DOCBOOK: Attributes for text direction and language

[Tsuguya Sasaki <ts@ts-cyberia.net>]

> It's been a while since I looked at this, so take
> it with a grain of salt, but I think that if you
> use Unicode (or UTF8), the codeset itself provides
> the information you need to render right to left
> and left to right text, including some characters
> that act as cues for cases where there might be
> ambiguity.  There is a technical report from the
> unicode consortium that discusses this:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/
>
> While that seems like the cleanest way to handle
> RTL and LTR text, I don't know whether browsers
> and/or stylesheets use this information.

Thank you very much for your reply. You are right, but the problem
is that numbers are neither LTR nor RTL intrincically, and are
interpreted either LTR or RTL depending on the direction of the
text preceding them.

So things can become quite complex and messed up, for example,
when you try start an LTR paragraph with RTL text chunks followed
by numbers; it's interpreted as an RTL paragraph, numbers come to
the right of the RTL text chunks, which is the correct visual order in
RTL paragraphs.

I asked what I asked because I'm planning to convert my documents,
mostly in the field of (Hebrew) linguistics, from Word format to
DocBook XML. Though DocBook may not be originally meant for
linguistic documentation originally, I thought (and still think) it
might be usable for this purpose without customizing its DTD.

Tsuguya Sasaki
http://www.ts-cyberia.net/

PS: Please reply only to the list. If you send a reply to me and to the
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