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Subject: marking directionality of text inside a paragraph
Hello, I am sending this proposal here according to the recommendation of Thorsten Behrens. I read the section about bidirectional text in the OpenDocument standard [1] and it says: "The writing mode attribute can be applied individually to paragraph styles, page styles, section styles, table styles, table cell styles, graphic styles and chart styles." If i understand it correctly, this means that it cannot be applied to text inside a paragraph and for that Unicode control characters, such as RLM, RLE and PDF must be used. In terms of HTML4, this means that it in OpenDocument it is possible to do something like <div dir="rtl">Arabic paragraph</div>, but it is not possible to do something like <span dir="rtl">Arabic sentence in an English paragraph.</span>. This feature is needed very frequently for quoting foreign names, sentences from foreign literature or mathematical formulas. For example, the English name of the company "Yahoo!" will appear incorrectly in a paragraph of Arabic or Hebrew text, because the exclamation mark will go to the other side ("!Yahoo"). Currently there are two solutions for that: 1. Writing the exclamation mark at the other end. This makes it appear correctly, but it breaks the logical order of the characters. 2. Using the characters LRE and PDF, as the standard suggests. It is possible, but it is too complicated for almost all end-users: these characters are not present on the common keyboard layouts and besides, the concept of invisible control characters is very hard for most people to comprehend. Adding this feature will make the life of many Open/LibreOffice users who write in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Hebrew and other such languages easier and it will improve the interoperability with HTML in general. I should also mention that i am working in the Wikimedia Foundation on improving the support of Wikipedia and related sites for bidirectional text; the next generation of the Wikipedia article editing interface may include support for this feature (based on HTML), so having this feature in ODF will particularly improve the interoperability with Wikipedia and related projects, by making it easier to export documents from OpenOffice to Wikipedia, for example. A possible challenge in implementing this feature is that the software must show the user who edits the document that a particular piece of inline text has different directionality. The directionality of a paragraph is usually obvious, but the different directionality of inline text is less obvious (especially when it's set correctly!). However, this is probably a consideration for the implementers and not for the standard authors. Thank you very much for consideration. Please let me know if you have any questions. [1] a very large HTML file: http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/cos01/OpenDocument-v1.2-cos01-part1.html#__RefHeading__1420402_253892949 -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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