The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters | Hacker News Reader

The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

blog.alexbeals.com

44 pointsdado321221 comments

If you are using plain text and don't have access to HTML or CSS markup, you can follow the RTL character with U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK to achieve the same effect. And even if you do have access to those things, using U+200E ensures that operations that strip markup (like copy-paste) don't break your text.

Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

> A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality.

Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.

This is true, but even in print, properly typeset, mixed LR/RL texts can end up having ambiguities thanks to line breaks.

A fun hack I remember was that Windows internally used two left-to-right control characters in a window title as an indicator that the entire window should have its content flipped right to left, images and all (imagine a clock animation running counter-clockwise).

This meant that if you could control the window title somehow you could create some surprising behavior, such as putting both those characters at the beginning of a post on a web forum and then having both the web page and browser look backward after someone opened the link.

I believe most things filter for this now, of course.

https://xkcd.com/1137/

Disappointed that xn--sei.com or <insert fleuron here>.com is apparently registered but not redirecting to ornately decorated texts.

Most browsers don't render punycode .coms very well the way we'd hope for these days. Homoglyph attacks ruined the fun.

This is why I stick to standard ASCII.

The millions of people who write in RL languages would like a word…

a word, or a drow?

But I'd also like a word with them. Or anyone else who might have a suggestion for "required reading". I'd like to think I know better than to use ascii art when it might flow into rtl text, but I wonder what other assumptions I've made that I should be aware are assumptions.

We need to force the entire world to switch to Esperanto written in pure ASCII for reduced carbon emissions from glyph layout algorithm overhead and peace and unity.

This is a bad idea for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Esperanto version of the Latin alphabet itself uses a number of unusual diacritics which are important for disambiguating words.

I would assume that "Esperanto written in pure ASCII" is referring to x-sistemo, which avoids the diacritics

Or Latin. More people know it than Esperanto and it can be written in pure ASCII.

More like the billions of people that use non-Latin languages, or even Latin languages w/ accents.

*laughs in Traditional Mongolian*

The Unicode committee needs to be dissolved or else Unicode is going to evolve into a full page markup scheme to rival pdf.

People are going to use Arabic and Hebrew whether you want them to or not

Human written language is genuinely complicated; Unicode (or something that solves the same problems Unicode is trying to solve) actually does need to be a complicated specification.

Yes, but real writing is also unbounded in complexity. Unicode can't do everything or it would just be a general purpose vector graphics language. Traditionally, writing systems had to adapt to the limitations of the technology (eg. runes with only straight lines for carving) or not using cursive for printing, but now computers can do so much, we just let everything go and try to recapture every arbitrary detail of the past we can squeeze in and people pay for that with human labor maintaining such a mountain of low-value capabilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com