Sunday, April 29, 2007

Orientation of text

When you have a text, you write either in a right to left direction, like in Arab or Hebrew, or you write in a left to right direction, like in English or Russian. In OmegaWiki, we are going to support the orientation for right to left once Multilingual MediaWiki is integrated in our software.

I have given SignWriting a lot of thought lately. This is a script that goes top to bottom. What I just realised is, that as as consequence a left to right word mixed into such an environment would also go top to bottom. It makes however as much sense to have a right to left word also go in the same direction.

The problem is that when you have both RTL and LTR in a top down environment, it will seem odd.

Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

  1. I've been trying to get some information on the SignWriting markup language SWML, but the site seems to have gone away. Did you have any better luck?

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  2. Yes, I asked on the mailing list :)

    http://sign-net.ucpel.tche.br/

    Thanks,
    GerardM

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