From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Jun 22 2005 - 00:09:51 CDT
Gregg Reynolds wrote:
> Jony Rosenne wrote:
>> In visual, embedded numbers and English are typed reversed, in visual
>> order,
>> while in logical order they are typed naturally and the software does the
>> RTL/LTR processing.
> In Arabic, this notion of "natural" ordering is just plain wrongo.
> Meaningless. Is it different in Hebrew?
Jony seems to be relating 'natural' simply to input order, the order in which characters
are 'typed naturally'. I think this is a reasonable use of natural -- although perhaps
'input order' is a better phrase --: you don't type Arabic backwards because it goes from
right-to-left. Natural order, in this sense, if I understand Jony correctly, is really
direction-agnostic. It is neither left-to-right nor right-to-left, but is waiting to have
directionality applied to it. However, it happens that sometimes one needs to describe or
list the natural order of a sequence of characters, and at that point one needs
*conventionally* to do so all in one direction. The common convention seems to be
left-to-right, but this convention should not be confused with directional text.
Personally, I think we could avoid this confusion if we adopted a convention of listing
input order character sequences bottom-to-top :)
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was An autobiography from the Jesuit underground, by William Weston SJ War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer
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