Re: Right-to-Left Punctuation Problem

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jul 29 2005 - 15:46:25 CDT

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: Right-to-Left Punctuation Problem"

    There's no anomaly here: what you have created is a left-to-right document
    that contains insertions of Hebrew. At end of the sentence, the document
    properties apply to the final punctuation.
    If you want to make sure that a complete Hebrew sequence (including its
    punctuation) will be interpreted right-to-left, you have to surround the
    Hebrew text with right-to-left bidi controls: The next paragraph for example
    starts with a RLE (Right-to-Left Embedding) Bidi control, and it is
    terminated by a PDF (Pop Directional Format), so that the cursor goes to the
    right when I use the "End" key:

    ‫המשפט הראשון בסדר! המשפט השני הוא גם־כן בסדר! אבל הפיסוק למשמפט האחרון עובר
    להתחלת הטכט!‬

    Your other example:

    ‫למה?‬‬

    The PDF at end is not absolutely required (only if you intend to resume the
    LTR processing of punctuation for your document), you can use a single RLE
    control at the beginning of your text.

    The semantic of the punctuation is not changed (only its presentation). You
    don't need other RTL punctuations...

    Also, you don't need RLE/PDF if your document is created using a default RTL
    context, for example if it uses a Hebrew charset, or if there's some other
    meta-data specifying that its language is Hebrew or that its presentation
    should be RTL by default for characters with weak (contextual)
    directionalities such as punctuation.

    Shalom!!
    ‫תודה רבה!!‬‬

    Philippe.

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Adam Reisman
    To: unicode@unicode.org
    Sent: Friday, July 29, 2005 8:57 PM
    Subject: Right-to-Left Punctuation Problem

    Has there ever been talk about creating a complete set of right-to-left
    Hebrew punctuation. I'm having problems with punctuation direction...or
    maybe I'm just doing it wrong. I have no problem when Using MS Word, but
    when I type up an email in Internet Explorer, the punctuation always jumps
    to the wrong end of the sentence. Then when I type the next sentence, the
    punctuation in the previous sentence jumps back to where it's supposed to
    be. This isn't a problem until I get to the last sentence of a paragraph or
    if I type a one-sentence line:

    המשפט הראשון בסדר! המשפט השני הוא גם־כן בסדר! אבל הפיסוק למשמפט האחרון עובר
    להתחלת הטכט!

    In the above example, the exclamation point on the far right, should be on
    the far left because it belongs to the last sentence.

    שלום!
    In the above example, the word "shalom" should have the exclamation point on
    the left.

    למה?

    Why?

    Is this a configuration issue I can correct, or is this something I'm doing
    wrong, or just something that people have to deal with? I can partially
    solve this by using the gershayim (U+05F4) as quotation marks, and the
    sof-pasuq (U+05C3) as a colon, but that's not enough. I thought about using
    Arabic punctuation, because it's coded right-to-left (it has a character I
    could use as a Hebrew comma, and the semi-colon and question mark are close
    enough even though they are inverted), but I worry that it will come out
    garbled when the person I write to tries to read it.

    (as an aside, another reason for Hebrew punctuation would be that in the
    Times Roman font, the punctuation doesn't match the Frankruhl Hebrew! The
    Hebrew period and all other punctuation dots should be diamond-shaped).

    Any thoughts or suggestions?

    תודה רבה!!
    Thank you!!

    P.S. Thank you for all who advised me on a font maker. I think Fontforge
    is the program I will start with, but I will also check out all the
    shareware suggestions you gave me :-)



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 29 2005 - 15:47:58 CDT