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The basics of Bidi

Deborah (Debbie) Anderson (Project lead, Script Encoding Initiative, Dept. of Linguistics, UC Berkeley) is helping in the organisation of a Unicode-hosted event on bidirectional text.

“The basics of Bidi”

Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 08:00 AM Pacific Time.

Background

A number of scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, write their letters horizontally on a page or screen, running right to left. A complication for these scripts is that other characters, such as digits, flow left-to-right, and can occur on the same line, or even alongside other left-to-right text, such as Latin. Text that handles both right-to-left and left-to-right text is called “bidirectional” text (“bidi” in short). How to handle bidi text on browsers and in other software is challenging for both general users and implementers. This webinar will describe the basics with examples. It will be followed by a live question-and-answer period. 

This is part 1 of a 2-part series, with the second more in-depth session to take place August 13, 2024. Note: This webinar will be recorded and it will be available for viewing later on the Unicode Consortium YouTube channel.

Registration

To register, please use this registration link. Feel free to share this announcement and link with any others who may be interested. As part of the registration, attendees can submit questions in advance.  

About The Speakers

The main presenter is Richard Ishida, who has served as the Internationalization Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 20 years. He also serves on the Unicode Editorial Committee and the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group. A live question-and-answer period will follow the talk, with Richard Ishida and Roozbeh Pournader fielding the questions. Roozbeh Pournader is an internationalization engineer who has been contributing to the Unicode Standard since 1999,

Additional Resources

https://unicode.org/faq/bidi.html

https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/uba-basics

https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts

https://www.w3.org/International/techniques/authoring-html#direction

https://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/techniques/authoring-html.en#gsdirection

Additional articles from W3C: https://www.w3.org/International/articlelist#direction 

Please feel free to share this information with your colleagues who also may be interested. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the Unicode events team at events@unicode.org.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Maroussia Bednarkiewicz (June 4, 2024). The basics of Bidi. DARIAH Multilingual DH. Retrieved April 21, 2025 from https://multilingual.hypotheses.org/254


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