[tex-k] Horizontal positioning of an hbox in a right-to-left bidi document doesn't work as expected

[Evan Aad]

Hello,

Consider the following piece of LaTeX code. When it is processed by
the XeTeX engine, the resulting PDF file shows that the last hbox is
not moved 3cm to the left as it is supposed to. In fact, it is flush
against the right text margin.

I have ruled out the possibility that this is a bug with the bidi
package by submitting this issue to the bidi project's bug tracking
system. I received a reply that the bug was not in bidi, but in the
TeX--XeT algorithm that XeTeX uses via e-TeX. In fact, the following
piece of demonstrating code was suggested to me by the maintainer of
the bidi project, as my original demonstration was more complex than
necessary.

***

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[RTLdocument]{bidi}
\begin{document}
\noindent\hbox{This horizontal box should contain enough text so that
its width is the same a}

\noindent\hspace{3cm}\hbox{This horizontal box should contain}

\noindent\hspace{3cm}\hbox{This horizontal box should contain enough
text so that}

\noindent\hspace{3cm}\hbox{This horizontal box should contain enough
text so that its width is the same a}
\end{document}