On Mon, 27 Aug 2007, Patrick Aljord wrote:
> My site in Arabic from right to left works great. But if I want to use
> some ltr strings in English, it messes up with my parenthesis like in
> this list:
>
> http://www.democralist.com/lists/show/61
I guess you mean that an entry containing a name in Latin letters get
displayed as
(algora (100 .2
whereas it should be
(100) algora .2
so that it can be read from right to left but with the "algora" word and
the number "100" from left to right. The problem arises because
parentheses have weak neutrality so that they are affected by surrounding
text.
(There are other problems as well, like forced horizontal scrolling with
no apparent need for it. The page is difficult to analyze to the amount of
redundant markup and embedded style sheets, so I may have misunderstood
the whole issue.)
Mixed directionality is a tricky issue and a general authoring problem
rather than specifically a CSS matter. In fact, it might be argued that
since directionality is so inherent a property of text, it would best be
handled either at the HTML level or at the character level (using Unicode
control characters) rather than CSS. Typically, when special measures are
needed for mixed directionality, using CSS for them is more complex than
using HTML.
I'd like to refer to a discussion of some bidirectionality problems:
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/bidirectional-text.html
Someone might well find a better solution, but the one I can imagine is
based on forcing the directionality, e.g.
<bdo dir="rtl">
<bdo dir="rtl">2.</bdo>
<bdo dir="ltr">algora</bdo>
<bdo dir="ltr">(100)</bdo>
</bdo>
You _could_ replace the bdo markup with CSS; e.g.,
<bdo dir="rtl">...</bdo>
could be replaced by
<span class="rtl">...</span>
and the CSS code
.rtl { unicode-bidi: bidi-override; direction: rtl; }
but would that really make sense?
> The problem is that the list is generated from the database so there
> is no way to guess if it's displaying arabic rtl or english ltr.
I'm afraid you would have to make the generator analyze the character data
to decide whether it's rtl or ltr text.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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