Bidirectional text

Bidirectional text consists of mainly right-to-left text with left-to-right nested segments, or vice versa. In languages involving bidirectional text (the StreamServer supports Arabic and Hebrew), the general text flow proceeds horizontally from right to left, but numbers are written from left to right. In addition, embedded addresses, acronyms, and quotations in a left-to-right language are also written from left to right.

Logical and visual order

Bidirectional text can be visually or logically ordered:

•	Logical order – the characters are ordered in the same way that they have been keyed. In this case, it does not matter if the text is Arabic, Hebrew, or Latin – direction has no meaning.

•	Visual order – the characters are ordered as they are displayed on a screen, printed page, or other medium.

Visually ordered input must be reordered to logical order before the StreamServer processes the text. See Reordering visually ordered input. Output from the StreamServer can be reordered to visual order if required. See Reordering output to visual order.