Mike Maxwell wrote: > Awhile back, we complained about the cursor movement in XXE when the > cursor is inside Arabic script (or, I presume, any right-to-left > script). The problem was that the visual position of the cursor did not > correspond to the insertion point. (It appears to us that the insertion > point behaves correctly when it passes from left-to-right script into a > stretch of right-to-left script, namely it jumps to the right-hand end > of the right-to-left stretch. The visual representation of that > insertion point, i.e. the visible cursor, is what's broken: as you press > the right arrow key, it moves left-to-right through the right-to-left > script.) Your response was that this is a Java issue, and therefore not > something you could easily fix.
If I said that, I was wrong. This is not a Java issue. We could support right-to-left scripts if we really wanted to. > > (BTW, I don't want to give the wrong impression by using the word > "complain": XXE support is wonderful, and I realize that you have to set > priorities, and that there are probably few people out there who want to > use Arabic script in XXE.) > > We've discovered another issue with Arabic script: selecting a word (a > bit tricky, because of the above cursor problem, but still possible) and > marking it for emphasis (i.e. wrapping it with the <emphasis > role="bold"> tag) results in switching the order of the words before and > after on the screen. > > For example, if the following were Arabic text: > word3 word2 word1 > then tagging word2 would result in the following on-screen display: > word1 _word2_ word3 > (where I have represented the on-screen bold emphasis by leading and > trailing underscores; I don't think most Arabic fonts support italicization) > > I presume the problem is that what was once a single stretch of > right-to-left text, and therefore laid out on-screen that way, has now > been broken into three spans, each of which is laid out right to left, > but the three spans are concatenated in a right-to-left fashion. > > Is there any chance of fixing this? No, we currently do not support right-to-left scripts and we do not plan to support right-to-left scripts in the near future. This is mainly a problem of funding: implementing this feature would cost us an arm and a leg.
