From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2006 - 11:33:12 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Prilop" <nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 2:08 PM
Subject: Re: [almost OT] Music score with RTL lyrics
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
>> In IE7, I don't see any difference between the two modes:
>> View > Encoding > Right to Left document
>> View > Encoding > Left to Right document
>
> This has absolutely nothing to do with my stylesheets!
And I absolutely don't see what you can mean here, because you speak about stylesheets, which I said look correct in both viewing modes, and Iamjust speking about these viewing modes.
Yes, you can't select the viewing mode in IE5 and IE6 (in fact this mode is just the default directionality for the root element of the HTML document, which is inherited unless it is changed by style or by a "dir=" attribute specified by the document for some element, in which case inheritance will apply to its sub-elements), but in IE7 you can select it.
In IE5 or IE6, the default directionality is guessed according to the document encoding, after it has been determined, and the directionality of characters in the elements that are nearest from the root. When the encoding determined is one designed for Hebrew or Arabic, it uses RTL default direction, otherwise it uses LTR. When the encoding is a UTF, the default directionality is guessed, and the directionality selection options appear in the View>Encoding menu.
This directionality only affects the ordering of spans, or table columns, or the position of the margin and scrollbars, or the default alignment of text blocks, and more generally the general page layout (including the position of the small selection button for combo boxes, or the alignment of displayed hand-over tooltips), but it does NOT affect the direction of characters, because this selection is NOT a forced Bidi override.
In theory, it should also mirror the icon used for the selection cursor... such as the arrow on non-text areas, or the hand on active links, something that IE7 still does not perform given that text parts are selectionable by a I-beam cursor, whose form is often symetric but could reflect the directionality of the text under the cursor for example with a L-shaped glyph, or a I-beam with a small horizontal bar on the baseline drawn only the same side as the line direction and starting at the selection point.
When the cursor points on text rendered with rotation, the cursor glyph could also rotate as well (This would probably require a vectorized glyphs for cursors, for example by selecting a special font for these cursor shapes, so that the cursor can be rendered accurately... But interestingly, the needed cursor shapes don't have any Unicode code associated to the standard selection function used in HTML and CSS.)
If the document specifies a directionality, this will always take precedence the selected viewing mode.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Mar 07 2006 - 11:35:20 CST