The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

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.

helterskelter•about 3 hours ago

> 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 alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.

Georgelemental•about 3 hours ago

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.

rhplus•about 3 hours ago

Disappointed that xn--sei.com or <insert fleuron here>.com is apparently registered but not redirecting to ornately decorated texts.

mapontosevenths•about 1 hour ago

Most browsers don't render punycode .coms very well the way we'd hope for these days. Homoglyph attacks ruined the fun.

Dwedit•about 2 hours ago

https://xkcd.com/1137/

SoftTalker•about 3 hours ago

This is why I stick to standard ASCII.

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

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

jjmarr•about 3 hours ago

More like the billions of people that use non-Latin languages, or even Latin languages w/ accents.

Chu4eeno•about 3 hours ago

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.

JuniperMesos•about 1 hour ago

This is a bad idea for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Esperanto version of the Latin alphabet itself uses a number of unusual diacritics which are important for disambiguating words.

grayhatter•about 3 hours ago

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.

qingcharles•about 3 hours ago

*laughs in Traditional Mongolian*

wang_li•about 2 hours ago

The Unicode committee needs to be dissolved or else Unicode is going to evolve into a full page markup scheme to rival pdf.

JuniperMesos•about 1 hour ago

Human written language is genuinely complicated; Unicode (or something that solves the same problems Unicode is trying to solve) actually does need to be a complicated specification.

foxglacier•37 minutes ago

Yes, but real writing is also unbounded in complexity. Unicode can't do everything or it would just be a general purpose vector graphics language. Traditionally, writing systems had to adapt to the limitations of the technology (eg. runes with only straight lines for carving) or not using cursive for printing, but now computers can do so much, we just let everything go and try to recapture every arbitrary detail of the past we can squeeze in and people pay for that with human labor maintaining such a mountain of low-value capabilities.

Georgelemental•about 2 hours ago

People are going to use Arabic and Hebrew whether you want them to or not

The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

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Discussion (17 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews