Bidirectional Text

[Ted Harding]

Hi Folks,

At present I am looking at the question of right-to-left languages
(as in european) and left-to-right languages (as in Hebrew, Arabic,
etc.), especially in connection with switching from one form to
the other in the course of a single text.

I'm doing this for the sake of groff (GNU troff), being a maintainer
of the package, and I have been looking at the work of Daniel Berry

   http://www.cs.tachnion.ac.il/~dberry/arabic.html

and other publications which can be found by poking around on his
home page

  http://www.cs.tachnion.ac.il/~dberry/

In Berry's approach, the right-to-left text is entered in "time
order" and formatted line-by-line as if it were left-to-right text.

Because of the way that ditroff (device-independent troff, which
groff emulates with extensions) generates its output (prior to
post-processing with an appropriate device driver) it is quite
feasible, though not completely straightforward, to write an
intervening postprocessor, with support macros for the troff source,
which can then reverse the already formatted output characters, in-line,
as they emerge from troff, for such characters as are part of
right-to-left text. Left-to-right text is left untouched.

I am wondering how (if at all) Lout addresses this question.

With thanks,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 29-Nov-99                                       Time: 11:51:29
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