3 ms·

Try for yourself! It might be very instructive, even if you can't reproduce this exact same issue. Install an RTL locale and keyboard setting (Arabic is more fu

Try for yourself! It might be very instructive, even if you can't reproduce this exact same issue. Install an RTL locale and keyboard setting (Arabic is more funky with the cursive script where letters change form after you input the _next_ letter, Hebrew is not, so it might be easier to recognize some issues). Either way, you don't need to know the language, just bang on the keyboard to produce some text. Or copy from somewhere. Now try to: enter numbers in the text (they are LTR at least in those two RTL locales). Try to select a passage with both text and numbers. Try to copy and paste words from, say, Arabic Wikipedia in the middle of English text, and vice versa. Enter parenthesis, especially near newlines. I don't know about you, but my intuition about where text will get inserted is sometimes quite wrong. Don't be alarmed if things work differently in different applications. Or perhaps, be. I still haven't figured out how to input RTL and LTR text properly in Slack using Firefox (I don't know which party to blame, even: me, browser, or Slack).

schoen 3y ago
The character rendering is much less context-dependent than Arabic, but Hebrew does have a few final forms which are different at the end of a word, so one can't strictly say that Hebrew characters will never change as a result of adding additional text. Just not nearly as much as Arabic characters do! Actually, I don't remember clearly how the different forms are handled by different character sets and if one would have to type them explicitly in some configurations. Surely on typewriters, but maybe not in Unicode?
- taneliv 3y ago
  True, I forgot those final forms in Hebrew. Perhaps my mind is conflating them with the initial capital letters of sentences and names in most text with Latin letters. On the different forms, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script_in_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script_in_Unicode has a short summary. It is possible to type those contextual forms explicitly (they have their own code points), but "presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text."

schoen 3y ago

The character rendering is much less context-dependent than Arabic, but Hebrew does have a few final forms which are different at the end of a word, so one can't strictly say that Hebrew characters will never change as a result of adding additional text. Just not nearly as much as Arabic characters do! Actually, I don't remember clearly how the different forms are handled by different character sets and if one would have to type them explicitly in some configurations. Surely on typewriters, but maybe not in Unicode?

taneliv 3y ago
True, I forgot those final forms in Hebrew. Perhaps my mind is conflating them with the initial capital letters of sentences and names in most text with Latin letters. On the different forms, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script_in_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script_in_Unicode has a short summary. It is possible to type those contextual forms explicitly (they have their own code points), but "presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text."