line breaks within arabic text containing letin characters

Dear all,

 

I have Arabic HTML containing some Names written in English. The
bidi-Algorithm works fine, I put all the English phrases into span tags with
the attribute dir=ltr, whereas the whole paragraph is set to rtl.

Now if it comes to a place, where a line has to be broken within the English
text, the following  happens:

the Arabic text starts left, then in the same line the English phrase starts
(that's ok), but after the line break, which the browser inserts because of
limited space on that line, the text in line 2 does not continue right to
left, but starts with the Arabic at the right, and then follows the rest of
the English phrase. So it looks like:

 

en en en ar ar ar ar

en en ar ar ar ar ar

 

So I get a block on the left of the two lines wich is in English, an one on
the right side that is Arabic. Reading thus starts upper right, folloes to
the left, then down to line 2 staying  on the left side, then jumping to the
right and reading until the middle of the line.

 

 

Strange behaviour of both EI and Firefox.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thank You very much!

 

Jasper Michalczik, Berlin