[oXygen-user] Bidirectional support

[Wendell Piez]

Hi,

I am helping a user set up oXygen Author for use with Hebrew, in which
I am regrettably illiterate. (But I know something about oXygen and
CSS.) These documents are not entirely or primarily Hebrew; they only
have occasional bits of Hebrew in paragraph or mixed content.

The support for bidirectional text in oXygen is getting really
impressive. But I have one request that I don't know how to address,
and don't know if it's possible. The users would like to be able to
see the locations of the Unicode control characters for right-to-left,
left-to-right, and 'pop', if not actually to color the text between
them.

Since CSS doesn't support character-level controls (tmk) I don't
believe this can be done. Am I right?

If I am, does anyone have ideas for possible approaches or workarounds?

My user is aware that (a) in bidirectional mode, oXygen indicates with
its cursor when there is a change in direction, and (b) that more
functionality is possible if his users are willing to use XML markup
and not only the Unicode control characters.

BTW, it looks to me as though oXygen automatically inserts the Unicode
controls when I insert characters from the Hebrew Unicode block. Is
this correct? Will it happen even when I'm in a place already
configured (using CSS on an element) that right-to-left is the
direction?

Thanks!
Wendell

Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
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