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The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

blog.alexbeals.com

1–10 of 23 posts

Re: The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

#3
Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

Re: The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

#5
post #4

This is why I stick to standard ASCII.

The millions of people who write in RL languages would like a word…

a word, or a drow?

But I'd also like a word with them. Or anyone else who might have a suggestion for "required reading". I'd like to think I know better than to use ascii art when it might flow into rtl text, but I wonder what other assumptions I've made that I should be aware are assumptions.

Re: The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

#8
post #4

This is why I stick to standard ASCII.

The millions of people who write in RL languages would like a word…

We need to force the entire world to switch to Esperanto written in pure ASCII for reduced carbon emissions from glyph layout algorithm overhead and peace and unity.

Re: The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

#9
If you are using plain text and don't have access to HTML or CSS markup, you can follow the RTL character with U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK to achieve the same effect. And even if you do have access to those things, using U+200E ensures that operations that strip markup (like copy-paste) don't break your text.
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