> From: E. Keown [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > For a small percentage of early Semitics stuff, it > would be convenient to be able to automatically > reverse the direction in a database, so the retrieval > algorithm could look at 'both directions.'
It's not clear to me what you have in mind. The directionality issue exists only when text is displayed. In a database, all text is linear from logical beginning to end, and without any spatial direction. The linear sequence may contain layout control characters such as RLE (U+202B) that will affect how display processes operate, but I wouldn't expect a retrieval algorithm to be particular interested in those layout controls. For a given piece of text "abc", does it matter to you whether in the source manuscript / tablet / whatever "abc" occurred in a RTL run vs. a LTR run? If not (which is what I suspect), then it will work the way you want without any extra work. > Is there a larger 'boustrophedon' note in Unicode 4.0? > Is there any interest in expanding the bidi algorithm > to definitely cover all possible RTL - LTR > boustropheda (plural?) ? No; any directionality issues beyond the mixing of directions within a *single* line is considered out-of-scope for Unicode, and are to be handled by higher-level specifications and mechanisms, such as document markup. > I assume that there is *no* complete list online of > all possible writing direction configurations. The obvious possibilities are obvious. The others are unlikely, but also not enumerable. I don't know of any comprehensive list; perhaps others do. > The discussion so far on the list doesn't appear to me > to cover every possibility....my impression is that > there are probably sub-varieties of boustrophedon Sure: in the alternate lines, is the orientation of equivalent characters the same? mirrored? rotated? other? Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
