⋮Bidi:⋮ ⋮What⋮ ⋮You⋮ ⋮See⋮ ⋮isn't⋮ ⋮What⋮ ⋮You⋮ ⋮Get⋮

Published at February 24, 2021 ·  4 min read

I stumbled across the problem of bidirectional text in terminals while trying to test a variant of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. The Unicode consortium publishes a set of bidi test-cases, which suffer from being somewhat “non-visual”. At the end of the day you want to deal with real sentences in real languages and scripts. Preparing that, you face a peculiar problem: how do you display your test output? After all, UAX#9 is about visual ordering of characters....