Hi Mr. Trotman, sorry for thinking you meant something else by "bidirectional".
On Saturday 19 Feb 2011 02:57:15 Lex Trotman wrote: > >> Hi Shiomi, > >> > >> Just for my education, in a batch tool like Asciidoc, what do you mean > >> by "bidirectional support"? I think I can understand what bidi > >> support means on a graphical tool, but not here? > > > > Some written human languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, > > Amaharic, Aramaic, etc. are written from right to left (rtl) instead of > > from left-to- right (ltr), and the Unicode standards provides an > > algorithm and some codepoints for mixing both rtl ( Arabic/Hebrew/etc. ) > > and ltr ( > > Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/etc.) in the same text. See: > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text > > I understand the above, but as I understand and as the reference above > states, bidi is about rendering the text, which is not something > Asciidoc does, thats the following rendering toolchain, eg HTML > browser, dblatex and PDF browser etc. As I understand it Asciidoc > output should retain the character order of its input. > Yes, you are right. However, as people the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between the two, while in practice, there is ( ;-) ). The Unicode standard defines several codepoints for handling its bidi algorithm (and there are others still around), and it does not cover text alignment (to-the-left, to-the-right, center, full, etc.). Furthermore, when writing XHTML, many people prefer to define something like <span dir="ltr">....</span> etc. instead of using the Unicode codepoints. I think the AsciiDoc document should at least mention these keywords and what to do about them, assuming we won't run into Bidi-related bugs in the process which will need to be fixed at the source code. > > Since some of my stories are written in Hebrew I need some way to right > > align the text, as well as set the dir="rtl" CSS attribute , > > Again thats in the rendering toolchain, at most you might want to > specify a role so that the CSS has something to hook itself onto eg > [rtl]#something to render the other way in the middle of a lot of ltr# > (see > http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X51 subsect 7.1.1) > Well, I skimmed it a little, and it may be good enough. I'll see about it. > > but I also sometimes > > mix English words or phrases inside a larger context and people may wish > > to say "In Hebrew an Apple is תפוח-עץ" in English. So I need some though > > and support for that in AsciiDoc. > > I understood that Unicode specified how to render directionality for > most characters, only occasionally you might need the LTR, RTL codes > when the algorithm makes the wrong decision (particularly for > punctuation). Although I gave an example above, I wouldn't have > thought you would want to have to mark directionality on all of your > text, most tiresome :-) True. Normally I make the master document's alignment and direction either suitable for Latin text or for Hebrew (whereas others may write in Arabic, Persian, Ethiopian, etc.) and then ocassionally mark certain words, phrases, paragraphs or sections in the opposite direction. If I write using Latin words in a Hebrew context (or vice versa), then the browser is smart enough to put them in the opposite direction, but it doesn't always handle punctuation gracefully. > > > This has nothing to do with converting from DB back to AsciiDoc. > > Didn't know you could, would be cool though :-) > Heh, yes. Well, I think someone wrote a DocBook->MediaWiki stylesheet and there's also: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=html+wikiconverter&mode=all HTML::WikiConverter has several backends and I don't see an AsciiDoc one, but writing one should be possible. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Funny Anti-Terrorism Story - http://shlom.in/enemy Chuck Norris can make the statement "This statement is false" a true one. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc?hl=en.
