> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2019 01:19:21 +0000 > From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> > > On Sun, 03 Feb 2019 19:50:50 +0200 > Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: > > > Do you see how this is carefully formatted to avoid overflowing an > > 80-column line of a typical terminal? Now suppose this is translated > > into a RTL language, which causes the Copyright line to start with a > > strong R letter (because "Copyright" is translated). You will see the > > first line flushed to the right margin, then the next line flushed to > > the left margin (because it's a separate paragraph, and starts with a > > strong L letter). Then the line which says "The default action..." > > will again start at the right. And so on and so forth -- the result > > is extremely ugly. > > Depending on the environment. If you look at it in Notepad, all lines > will be LTR or all lines will be RTL.
That's because Notepad implements _only_ the higher-level protocol for base paragraph direction: there's no way to make Notepad determine the direction by looking at the text. > Would not a careful translator either ensure that each non-blank > line had a strong character and that all first strong characters > were (a) L, (b) R or (c) AL? This is very hard in practice, and is a tremendous annoyance when translating message catalogs to RTL languages. Translation is a hard enough job even without this complication.