I remember something "Problem in ETeX with right to left typesetting" on the comp.text.tex related to this. See the link http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/3c833c1243cad474/74c1ad123ca92241?hl=fr&lnk=gst&q=+%5Cpredisplaydirection+%5CbeginR#74c1ad123ca92241 Maybe Morten remembers :-) Jabri Youssef