From: Mark Davis (mark@macchiato.com)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2008 - 15:35:25 CST
Mirrored ASCII
Document at: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfqr8rd5_353ft4xw6hj
For testing BIDI UI enablement, it turns out to be very useful to use
mechanisms that give non-Arabic/Hebrew users an accurate picture of how a
"reversed" UI would look. For this, it is useful to have Unicode letters
that are the visual reversals of ASCII letters. With a pixel mirroring, the
page would then come out looking (roughly) like English, with UI elements in
the right places, and everything readable.
My first attempt is in the attached graphic, first before graphic mirroring,
then after. Look at the white box on the left bottom of the "After"
image.Before
Pixel Mirroring:
After Pixel Mirroring:
A bit crude so far (some letters definitely could use improvement!), but
actually readable. The challenge is to pick the best characters in the fonts
available on most people's browsers (although people can be requested to
download fonts like Code2000). Because we want the characters to work right
as far as linewrap, etc., if possible they should have pretty much the same
properties as the respective ASCII letters.
The table of mappings that I used above is at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pA-jnsSQQRcY3IFcweX3GOgI would
appreciate any feedback on better choices that I can incorporate into that
table. Some of the above above could definitely stand improvement:
especially the capitals K, P, L, and G, and lowercase t, k, g, and h. I also
need to add digits and common punctuation.
Checking If you want to try it out on some text:
1. Go to http://demo.icu-project.org/icu-bin/translit
2. Into the Compound 1 box, type: *mirror*
3. Into the Input box, put some text.
4. Hit the Transform button
I used for #3:
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Nov 04 2008 - 16:05:56 CST