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The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

blog.alexbeals.com

21–23 of 23 posts

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

#21
A fun hack I remember was that Windows internally used two left-to-right control characters in a window title as an indicator that the entire window should have its content flipped right to left, images and all (imagine a clock animation running counter-clockwise).

This meant that if you could control the window title somehow you could create some surprising behavior, such as putting both those characters at the beginning of a post on a web forum and then having both the web page and browser look backward after someone opened the link.

I believe most things filter for this now, of course.

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

#22
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Latin. More people know it than Esperanto and it can be written in pure ASCII.

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

#23
post #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.

> 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. Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality. Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of al…

This is true, but even in print, properly typeset, mixed LR/RL texts can end up having ambiguities thanks to line breaks.
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