Re: [SVGMobile12] Lack of BIDI 'direction' (ISSUE-2058)

Doug Schepers wrote:
> Hi, fantasai-
> 
> fantasai wrote (on 10/28/08 7:10 PM):
>> Doug Schepers wrote:
>>> fantasai wrote (on 9/17/08 7:51 PM):
>>>> I therefore strongly recommend that SVG Tiny include the 'direction'
>>>> property.
>>> Thanks for your suggestion.  We agree with you and the I18N WG, and have
>>> added both 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties. [1]
>>>
>>> http://dev.w3.org/SVG/profiles/1.2T/publish/text.html#DirectionProperty
>>   # For the 'direction' property to have any effect, the 'unicode-bidi'
>>   # property's value must be embed or bidi-override.
>>
>> This is false. As I explained before, the 'direction' property alone has an
>> effect when set at the paragraph level ("paragraph" being the unit of text
>> the bidi algorithm operates on).
>>
>>   # The 'direction' property applies only to glyphs oriented perpendicular
>>   # to the inline-progression-direction, which includes the usual case of
>>   # horizontally-oriented Latin or Arabic text and the case of narrow-cell
>>   # Latin or Arabic characters rotated 90 degrees clockwise relative to a
>>   # top-to-bottom inline-progression-direction.
>>
>> This doesn't make any sense. The 'direction' property does not apply to
>> glyphs, it applies to text runs. (Although when combined with
>> "bidi-override" it does also apply to characters.)
> 
> As I understand it, the wording for 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' comes
> directly from SVG 1.1, and has been around for a while.  However, it's
> possible that there was an error (or ambiguity) in that spec.  If you
> could propose alternative wording, and if the I18N WG concurs with you,
> the SVG WG will almost certainly make the suggested change (though I'd
> have to check with them first, of course).

I suggest removing the text. The first quoted sentence is very clearly wrong.
The second quoted sentence is most likely referring to the effects of the
glyph-orientation properties, which are not included in SVG 1.2 Tiny, and
which are very poorly defined in SVG 1.1.

~fantasai