Re: Proposing new arrow characters with Bidi_Mirrored=Yes

On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 3:05 PM Nitai Sasson via Unicode <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I just had a thought. Would it make sense to prescribe the Variation
> Selectors to do this?


I think that would be absolutely terrible.
Variation selectors are a "pretty please" request to select a specific
glyph, if that's available.
So you get an arrow pointing one way on a system that has a ligature-type
mapping in its font, and an arrow pointing the opposite way on a system
that doesn't.

https://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/core-spec/chapter-23/#G19053

I think the right way to deal with this in something like directions ("go
from A --> B") is to use a placeholder for the arrow, as well as for the A
and B, and populate the arrow placeholder with the one that points
"forward" according to the directionality of the text box = the
directionality of the UI language.

markus