Hebrew in markup

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2015, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about "Hebrew in markup":
> But I could not figure a simple way with any of those to get decent
> control of bidi. Or specifically:
> 
> * Make the whole document RTL
> * Make various paragraphs LTR
> 
> I guess I need to override some styles. With asciidoc I could not find a
> simple way to do that and ended up having to create my own separate
> "bidi" style. I didn't yet check all the various reSt and markdown
> implementations. Any better alternatives?

I see the discussion in this thread focused on how to edit such a
document, but I think there's a deeper issue here - not how to edit
this document, but how the different "markdown" displayers and
converters (the most popular is, of course, githaps) will *display*
the resulting document.

15 years ago, I approached the same problem in pure-text documents
(such as emails) by inventing my own conventions (embodied in the "bidiv"
program) which automatically determines each paragraph's direction
in a "natural" (I think) way: I decided on a convention that paragraphs
are separated by a blank line, and a paragraph's direction is the direction
of its first directioned character.

It would be wonderful if popular markdown converters would be added
a similar automatic direction convention, so Hebrew paragraphs would
"just work" (and be right-aligned) without any concious changes to the
text needed. Seems very easy to add this support to any particular
markdown converter (I'd start with github's...).

Alternatively, (or additionally,) special markdown conventions could be
added to control directionality.

Unicode also has the LRM, RLM characters, but I *don't* recommend
those - I hate invisible characters in my documents.

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Nadav Har'El                        |     Wednesday, Apr 1 2015, 12 Nisan 5775
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