On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 07:21:40PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > While the rules regarding bidi transitions are rather complex (and setting > aside for the moment the inconsistency of whether or not to translate > "SCSI"), it's clear that these translation's can't *both* be right: the > parentheses need to go one way or the other, not just picking one at random. > Which way to go is up to the Arabic translators, I think, but if they decide > to use the parenthesis inversion (which I imagine is the more natural style > in Arabic), they will also need to use a direction marker so that the string > actually gets formatted right-to-left! The necessary marker appears to be > Unicode character U+200f, RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK. Unfortunately, I can't seem > to actually make this work in testing here (outside of d-i); I'm happy to > float some patched po files to you, Christian, if you have time to look into > this further to confirm whether the results are correct under d-i itself. Further research shows that RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK is used for modifying the RTL property of the preceding character; two other modifiers, RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING and RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE, are more relevant to changing the orientation of strings. http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/msdn/Control.aspx has some information about these control characters, though I'm afraid I didn't find it very enlightening about the difference between EMBEDDING and OVERRIDE here. I'm still trying to trial-and-error my way to something that turns the string the right way around. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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