Re: DIR property

I think that the current version of Amaya doesn't support 
bi-directional text. The last one I had installed was 2.0 
and I suspect that such an improvement would have been 
mentioned in the change log. Looking forward for bi-directional 
support in Amaya...

The only free editor that supports bi-directional text 
that I know of is Microsoft's Explorer Frontpage Express. I have 
it working OK on a Windows 95 machine with Hebrew support. I do not 
know if it will work on a Windows version without Hebrew/Arabic 
support.

It supports the dir attribute, and blocks get aligned correctly 
when it is used. It also allows having different elements 
with different base directionality (the dir attribute).
(a feature not available in word processors that built HTML 
support on top)

It doesn't have an interface to insert bi-di overrides
(the <bdo> tag), but allows it via direct editing of the 
code (Big problem when writing some math). 

The rendering when editing is quite poor, (based on Windows 
bidi implementation and not on Unicode, (which increases my belief that it won't 
work at all on a non-bidi Windows.) so overrides do not render 
correctly, as well as some complicated words or phrases that mix letters 
and numbers or Latin characters. Also the direct editing (like a text editor)
applies Bidi to everything including the markup, which can be very confusing. 
(Mirrored tag delimiters...)

It should be pointed out though that Internet Explorer (the browser)
implements Unicode bidi (so far I found no bugs).

If you find a good bidi HTML/XML editor I'll be happy to check it out.

Regards,
Nir.
===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2000 07:06:07 UTC