On Friday, 11 April 2025 at 00:27, Doug Ewell via Unicode
<unicode@corp.unicode.org> wrote:
> OK, so just to be clear, you’re talking about a mechanism where the user
> enters:
>
> U+05D0 HEBREW LETTER ALEF
> U+0020 SPACE
> U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS
> U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS
> U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN
> U+05D1 HEBREW LETTER BET
>
> (where the entire sequence --> is mirrored to look like <-- when surrounded
> by strong RTL characters) and have it replaced by:
>
>
> U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW
>
> except that the arrow is visually mirrored depending on the directionality of
> the surrounding characters.
>
> From my casual reading, it feels like two separate topics are being discussed
> — glyph mirroring, and replacement of Basic Latin fallback input with true
> arrow characters — and I want to make sure I understand the use case.
That is 100% correct. Including the bit about these being two topics.
The replacement of Basic Latin fallback input with true arrow characters is an
example use case of the proposed solution.
Here is another example use case: a string template "%s → %s" where the input
strings are of unknown directionality, and the intention is for the arrow to
point "forwards" from the first argument to the second argument. For the sake
of argument, both strings are guaranteed to have the same directionality
throughout.
Glyph mirroring is the solution to these example use cases, and already works
for other characters.
For example, the template: "%s ⊸ %s" will always have the line next to the
first string and the dot next to the second string. The operator character is
U+22B8 MULTIMAP https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=22B8
Demonstration:
one ⊸ two
אחד ⊸ שתיים
Results may depend on your system, but on my screen the operator points in
opposite directions between these two lines.
The discussion is about making this behavior available for arrow characters.
