On 07/12/2012 13:17, Khaled Hosny wrote: > Being named left and right does not necessarily mean they don't > actually mean start and end, after all who named them was only > considering left to right, top to bottom setting.
Also a perfectly reasonable position. > Now, if I understand > \left and \rightskip correctly, it seems like something one wants to > mirror with directional change, otherwise one would want to explicitly > adapt styles depending on text directionality, which is not something I > really like (especially when dealing with something like LaTeX styles > that are PITA to modify). I'm not sure that follows at an engine level (LaTeX2e's deficiencies are a different matter). If you think about sitting down with a piece of paper to design a layout, the text direction does not affect which side of the paper is the left, and therefore a design description may well refer to 'left' and 'right' of the page whether the dominant direction is LTR or RTL. > In general the layout in right to left settings is usually an identical > mirror of left to right one (including the position of odd and even > pages). That's only true if you are assuming you are producing both LTR and RTL documents from one design spec: seems unlikely. > We also need to consider top to bottom directionality, which I > suspect is handled the same. Needs people with expertise in that area, which I certainly don't have. I can't imagine paragraphs in vertical typesetting, but I may be wrong. -- Joseph Wright
