Bidirectional considerations

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To work with bidirectional text, you must enable bidirectional support. When working with bidirectional text, you might encounter the following issues.

Visual mode display in the Source page

When working in the Source page editor environment, you can use the Shift+NumLock key combination to enable or disable the Visual display format for bidirectional data.

Visual mode text entry in the Source page

In Windows, you can directly enter English data in the Source page editor. However, if you are in Visual mode, you cannot directly type Arabic or Hebrew data in the Source page editor.

To enter or edit bidirectional data when in Visual mode, use the Ctrl+NumLock key combination to open a pop-up Source page editor. This editor enables Visual ordering of text and Visual input key functions.

If you have selected text in the Source page when you open the editor, it is displayed as initial data in the pop-up editor. If no text is selected, the editor does not display any initial data.

The data from the Visual editor window is saved in Visual format and placed at the cursor position in the Source page. If text is selected in the Source page, it is overwritten with the input from the Visual editor.

Error tracing

If general logging is enabled, you can trace bidirectional function errors by checking the log files.
The following bidirectional functions are logged:
  • Screen Reverse
  • Numerical Swapping
  • Symmetrical Swapping
  • Push and Autopush
  • Switching between Hindi and Arabic numerals
  • Field Reverse
  • Switching between Visual and Logical modes

Arabic considerations

For Arabic content, the following Seen tail character limitations exist:
  • In BMS map set files that are uploaded to the remote system, Seen tail characters are displayed as Seen 3/4 (without tail) in emulators such as Personal Communications or Host On-Demand.
  • When downloading a BMS map set file from the remote system, Seen tail characters are not read correctly.

    You can use the BMS Map Editor to replace the empty tail character. Select the Source tab to directly edit the map code. Put a space character in the location of the empty tail character.