Re: Fwd: I-D Action: draft-msporny-d-langtag-ext-00.txt

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> So how do you use a present-day language tag to set the paragraph
> direction for Middle Egyptian in hieroglyphs?  Do you have to do
> something like ensuring that the scope of the Middle Egyptian language
> tag doesn't extend to the starts of paragraphs?  (Reminder: Ancient
> Egyptian Egyptian hieroglyphs could be laid out in either order;
> right-to-left was the default, but nowadays the default is left to
> right, apparently even in Arabic publications!

Mark suggested that even the present-day Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian use cases were somewhat out of scope, so I suspect Middle Egyptian might also be beyond the use case that is being discussed here.

The quick answer is that BCP 47 language tags do not cover that. That is what the D extension proposal aims to solve.

My arguments regarding the proposed D extension have been that:

(a) for the posited use cases, primarily Arabic, the proposed solution is not necessary, because explicit or implicit script subtags already indicate direction, and

(b) for use cases such as mine, the proposed solution is not sufficient, because the repertoire is not extensible.

> And what if you want to have English text in right-to-left paragraphs?

I assumed we were sticking to real-life use cases. That said, in BabelPad I get the desired result with a Latin-script line by prefixing it with RLO.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org