Re: [office] Appendix on Bidi

[Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Daniel, all,

thank you very much for your proposal. I have taken this one and the 
various other e-mails regarding this topic, and some additional 
explanations I got from my colleague Frank Meies, and have created an 
BiDi appendix document. The document is located at

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/18504/06-06-01-bidi-appendix

I think it addresses most of the BiDi related comments we received from 
Egypt, Israel and the UK.

I further would like to propose that we include this appendix (or a 
revised one) into the OpenDocument 1.1 specification.

Best regards

Michael

Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I finally got around to writing that appendix about Bi-directional text. 
> Sorry for the delay. I think this Appendix should be titled:
> 
> Appendix E. Notes on Multilingual Support (Non Normative)
> 
> So the current appendix E (changeset) and F (notes) would be upped by 
> one letter. This is the text I suggest (mostly copied from Lars' email):
> 
> <appendix>
> Heading:  Appendix E. Notes on Multilingual Support (Non Normative)
> Sub heading: Bidirectional Text
> 
> OpenDocuemnt has full support for bidirectional text (bidi). This is 
> done through the Unicode standard version 4.0.0 combined with section 15 
> of the OpenDocuemnt specification.
> 
> Unicode 4.0.0 specifies, in chapter 15.2 ("Bidirectional Ordering 
> Controls") and Annex #9 ("The Bidirectional Algorithm") how to embed 
> right-to-left text in a left-to-right paragraph and vice versa as long 
> as the base direction of the enclosing paragraph is established. The 
> base direction is provided by OpenDocument Section 15.5.36, 
> style:writing-mode attribute.
> 
> For example, to embed an English quotation in the middle of an Arabic 
> paragraph, the enclosing paragraph could have the style:writing-mode 
> "rl-tb" and the embed English text could be marked by a LRM (U+200E) 
> character.
> 
> See also sections 15.2.19, 15.7.8 and 15.8.13.
> </appendix>
> 
> Cheers,
> Daniel.