On 8/11/05, Kazunari Hirano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Art and all, > Art - Arthit Suriyawongkul wrote: > > Thai: CTL, LTR, HTL > Thanks. > When you say Thai is CTL, how is Thai text layout complex? > I don't see exactly what CTL means, what is complex. > Thai, Oriya, Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew and so on are called CTL languages. > Why are they called CTL? What are they complex about? > :)
Sun has a very nice documentation on CTL. http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806-5583/6jej7sqe9?a=view It addresses the fundamental characteristics of CTL languages and I am going to repeat here. * Bidirectional text--Arabic and Hebrew are written right to left, but numbers and Roman-based characters are written left to right. * Contextual analysis--each Arabic character has up to four display representations. The representation glyph depends on its position in the text. * Ligatures--combinations of two or more Arabic characters can form a different, single character. Diacritics--diacritical marks placed above, below, or inside vowels and consonants modify their tonal value. * Character clusters--syllables and cells, especially in Thai, are composed of several alphabetic elements, including vowels, consonants, diacritics, and tone marks. * Number and date formats--some Arabic countries use Hindi digits rather than Arabic digits, and the Islamic calendar rather than the Western calendar. Korean is not CTL, because it is unidirectional - LTR. Regarding to document layout, we had used VTL traditionally. However, it had been replaced by HTL with modernization of society. Nowadays, we don't use VTL anymore except for special case. In short, Korean is HTL/VTL. Regards, -- Jeongkyu Kim OpenOffice.org Korean community lead Official website http://ko.openoffice.org Community forum http://oooko.net/ Personal blog http://oooko.net/gomme --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
