Re: controlling digits substitution in IE/FF (Arabic/Hindi/Decimal)

Hello Daniel,

I also noticed that and thought that it was the browsers own initiative 
(based upon what?) to display Arabic-Indic digits in stead of the 
original European digits.

It may be worth to note that Arabic-Indic digits are mostly used in 
middle-east, with regard to north-africa. So numeric keys on keyboards 
may vary, and composers will produce Indic-digit codes or European-digit 
codes.

Anyway, On Mac OS, with Opera, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla (SeaMonkey) 
things are OK, but  for Mozilla. It does the inverse: Arabic-Indic 
digits codepoints (U+0660 to U+0669) are displayed as European digits (a 
bug?).
But, as Richard noted, I Copy/Paste these digits elsewhere and I 
retrieve the original Arabic-Indic digits.

As Richard also noted, dir="rtl" attribute has no effect. Nor does 
lang="ar".

Codes are different: European digits are U+0030 to U+0039, and 
Arabic-Indic are U+0660 to U+0669. My opinion is that one should get 
what she/he codes.

Regards,

Najib


Daniel Goldschmidt wrote:
> Hey,
>
> In Arabic (and other language) the European Decimal digits can be 
> substitute by Hindi digit depending the context.
>
> On Windows platform there is a possibility to set the digits 
> substitution behavior to as follow:
>  - Context (the default)
>  - None
>  - National
>
> (Control Panel -> Regional and Language Setting -> Regional Options -> 
> Customize)
>
> I'm experiencing differences in the behavior of  Firefox, Chrome, and 
> Internet Explorer, while displaying digits in pages with dir="RTL" 
> (with Regional Options set to Arabic(Egypt)):
> In Firefox/Chrome the digits are not substituted (European Decimal 
> digits are displayed)
> In IE digits are substituted (Hindi digits are displayed)
>
> Questions:
> What is the reason for those behaviour of the different browsers?
> Can I control (using CSS or markups) the behaviour? (I cannot expect 
> the end-user to change his/her setting in the control panel...).
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
> -- 
> Daniel Goldschmidt
> Internationalization and Localization expert
> www.locflowtech.com <http://www.locflowtech.com>
>
> Office: +972-72-212-2350
> Mobile: +41-78-774-6307
> Skype: dgoldschmidt
>
>
> Visit us at www.localizationworld.com <http://www.localizationworld.com>
>

-- 
Najib TOUNSI (mailto:tounsi @ w3.org)
W3C Office in Morocco (http://www.w3c.org.ma/)
Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs, BP. 765 Agdal-RABAT Morocco
Phone : +212 (0) 537 68 71 50 (P1711)  Fax : +212 (0) 537 77 88 53
Mobile: +212 (0) 661 22 00 30

Received on Thursday, 14 May 2009 13:46:31 UTC