Hi Jonathan: Welcome to the multi-language war veterans club! Your purple heart is in the mail.
There IS actually a logic as to how characters are laid out when typing mixed L-T-R and R-T-L text in a line or sentence, but you need to understand that most text rendering mechanisms continue to make some unwarranted assumptions. First off, some punctuation in "foreign" (i.e. non-Latin) scripts is taken from what used to be called the lower ASCII characters. This makes some sense, as there is no point in duplicating identical characters that are used for identical purposes. BUT: when the text rendering engines encounter such characters while typing in another script, they decide that the typist is back to using Latin script which, as you've seen, can be disastrous. With Hebrew Script (used in Hebrew, Yiddish and perhaps others I'm not aware of), there is an additional problem: Like most languages, Hebrew uses the same set of parentheses as English, and treats "opening" and "closing" as meaning the curve is towards the innards of the set. Since Hebrew is written from right-to-left, however, what is an "opening" paren in Latin scripts is a "closing" paren in Hebrew and vice-versa. This is the reason that the opening paren is above the 9 key for both keyboard layouts, but they face the opposite direction (the "(" is above the "9" key on English keyboards and above the "0" key on many Hebrew keyboards) . Because of the flaw in the way rendering engines recognize these characters (both of which are in the "Latin" set) as indicating a return to English, you lose! Well, you get the idea. Arabic - another RTL script used in far more languages than Hebrew - leaves the "(" and ")" characters in the same positions they are on English keyboards. If you go to LibreOffice Bug #92655 (https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92655) I attached a pdf document there titled "General Discussion of Complex Text Attributes" which you can download; this (and particularly page 14 &ff) describes some of the details of the issue you're running into, and Hebrew is one of the specific scripts used as an example. Jonathon(toki)'s advice given above is spot on! If you understand what's actually going on, and understand the characters to avoid having in certain places and why (that's where I think my document may help you), you can intermingle multiple directions within single lines successfully almost all the time. Like him, I've done this for long enough to be able to get it done, but I also have my own "tricks" to keep my head screwed on straight when composing. LibreOffice, which like most apps relies on an external rendering engine (I believe it's HarfBuzz now, but am not certain) is affected by this rendering assumption, as you have seen. You may also run into LibreOffice sometimes substituting fonts unnecessarily when you switch, even if you have specifically selected a font containg both scripts/languages you are using. This results from some fonts not properly reporting which scripts and languages they support. So the rendering engines dutifully find a substitute font to use. It's messy. The other document attached to the same bug report discusses many other side effects you'll need to become aware of. You might also take a look at bug 32357 which deals with auto-completion quirks when using multiple languages. But it can be done: Best of Luck, and if you have other questions, or discover new tricks, please post them. Frank -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Struggling-with-Hebrew-in-LO-tp4198211p4198326.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted