[XeTeX] xetex and the unicode bidirectional algorithm.

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Dec 4 00:39:12 CET 2013


2013/12/3 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 01:42:21PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> Does XeLaTeX implement the Unicode BiDi algorithm?
>
> Short answer: no.
>
> Long answer: XeTeX, more or less, breaks words at spaces or other
> non-character material (spaces in TeX are converted to the so called
> glue, so are not handled as characters) and applies the Unicode BiDi
> algorithm to each word separately, which effectively means it is just
> used to determine the direction of the individual word.
>
>> If so, why isn't it working (I can provide a TeX sample)?  If not,
>> does anyone have any suggestions for workarounds -- other than
>> implementing the BiDi algorithm myself and adding explicit \RL and \LR
>> commands?
>
> I think sample documents (minimal working example) are needed for any
> useful suggestion.
>
I do not want to give any suggestion without analysis of sample
documents but you should remember that without proper language tagging
XeTeX will not use correct \pattern for hyphenation.

> Regards,
> Khaled
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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