Sunday, April 29, 2007

Orientation of text

When you have a text, you write either in a right to left direction, like in Arab or Hebrew, or you write in a left to right direction, like in English or Russian. In OmegaWiki, we are going to support the orientation for right to left once Multilingual MediaWiki is integrated in our software.

I have given SignWriting a lot of thought lately. This is a script that goes top to bottom. What I just realised is, that as as consequence a left to right word mixed into such an environment would also go top to bottom. It makes however as much sense to have a right to left word also go in the same direction.

The problem is that when you have both RTL and LTR in a top down environment, it will seem odd.

Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

NotACat said...

I've been trying to get some information on the SignWriting markup language SWML, but the site seems to have gone away. Did you have any better luck?

GerardM said...

Yes, I asked on the mailing list :)

http://sign-net.ucpel.tche.br/

Thanks,
GerardM