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000015_icon-group-sender _Thu Jan 22 15:10:52 1998.msg
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Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU [192.12.69.239])
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id PAA27371
for <icon-group-addresses@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>; Thu, 22 Jan 1998 15:10:52 -0700 (MST)
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From: gep2@computek.net
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 11:47:17 -0600
Message-Id: <199801221747.LAA24703@axp.cmpu.net>
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Subject: Re: Hebrew
To: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
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>> Hebrew is a right-to-left language. Icon is oriented toward left-to-right
> analysis, from all that I can tell.
>
> (1) Can Icon be reoriented to go right-to-left?
>No. If that is what you want it is cleaner to just reverse the
string before scanning. There are all ready too many dyslexic
people in the world. Have mercy.
>> (2) Failing that, are there any pitfalls in simply reversing the text of the
> Hebrew, and running Icon left-to-right against the reversed text?
>Make sure you reverse the order of the words but not the letters in the
words. At least I think that is what you want to do. I saw the
Dead Sea Scrolls and I don't remember having to have my eyes jump
all over the place. I'm a little confused as to how Hebrew is written
in ASCII.
Most of the software I've seen which supports Hebrew (I used to support a
consulting client whose tri-lingual office ran in French, English, and
Hebrew...) uses one of *several* different techniques for supporting the Hebrew
alephs (characters) within the 256-character Extended ASCII character set.
Generally they usurp some range of other characters (sometimes the European
characters (this is NOT good if you're also trying to simultaneously support
French!), sometimes the box-drawing characters, sometimes others) and between
the differing ideas by the people who design the display fonts, and the people
who do the printer fonts, and the people who do keyboard support, and the people
who do the applications software itself... you tend to have a REAL MESS.
MS-DOS international keyboard drivers (for example) generally support switching
dynamically between "foreign" and US English... CTRL-ALT-F1 for US English, and
CRTL-ALT-F2 for "foreign". But if you want to switch between (say) Hebrew and
French, then you usually have a serious problem.
It's actually quite surprising how badly foreign languages tend to be supported
in most software, and Hebrew with its quite special requirements is one of the
more difficult ones it seems to support well.
Gordon Peterson
http://www.computek.net/public/gep2/
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