This is a thing I have wondered about. are arabic numbers little endian when embeded in arabic text? The text is read right to left. But the numbers are the same as we put them in our left to right text where they are big-endian(read big to small). so are numbers in original arabic little-endian? read small to large. with the interesting side effect that numbers are universal.
replyI think he's talking about the rendering algorithm with regards to the stream of text. essentially saying rendering direction should follow reading convention.
replyon the other hand, in formal arabic, it's not unusual that numers are read in clusters from least significant to most significant (right to left). 1984 would be read : eighty four and nine hundred and a thousand. not sure if the author is aware of this
> rendering direction should follow reading convention.
replyWhat does that even mean in this context? In a strictly LTR language, sure, you read left-to-right and the glyphs are rendered left-to-right. But the whole discussion is about bidirectional text, where the text is rendered by a complex algorithm. What is the “rendering direction”?
I know just enough about some RTL languages to know that one can absolutely intersperse RTL text with, say, and English phrase, and you still read the first (leftmost in the group) English sound first and so on :)
if you write (with a pen) text with mixed arabic, numbers, english words. then somebody else gets to read it, he will read arabic from right to left, then when when he encouters a number or an english word, he will naturally jump to the first latin letter of the word and start reading left to right, then jump back to the beginning if the next arabic word and switch back to RTL. the alogorithm should copy that behaviour.
replyactually : four and eighty and nine hundred and a thousand
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