Hebrew in markup

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2015 11:49:34 +0300
> From: Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>
> 
> 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.

By some lucky accident (or maybe something else), Emacs adopts the
same convention regarding determination of the paragraph base
direction.

In addition, Emacs provides a means to force paragraph direction on
the entire buffer: a buffer-local variable named
bidi-paragraph-direction.

If you want to force base direction on just some paragraphs in a
buffer, you can use the LRM and RLM controls.

> 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...).

How do you right-align text without knowing the width of the screen
line which will be in effect when the text will be displayed?

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

They don't have to be invisible (Emacs does display them), and
sometimes you cannot do without them, and stay compatible.  IOW, they
are there for a reason.