Re: Collapsible Outlining in Foreign Languages

On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 16:41 -0400, Randy Kramer wrote:
> Every once in a while I think about collapsible outlining again.
>
> Recently I got to wondering how it could be done for some of the foreign
> languages with unusual line organizations, e.g., bidi. Some questions:
>
> Do I understand the some bidi languages alternate a line of left to right text
> with a line of right to left text?

In historical writings, this happened. But no alive & written language
does so nowadays. The text is either LTR or RTL (subject, of course, to
complications due to embedded text with the reverse directionality - but
it should not bother you because such text usually consists only of
short phrases - like an English word or a number embedded in a RTL
text).

> What does a table of contents look like in that language(s)? (I ask that
> because a ToC is a reasonable approximation of what a collapsed outline looks
> like.)

At least in Hebrew, the logical ordering of characters is the same as in
LTR languages. In the following examples, I follow the convention that
lowercase letters are LTR and uppercase letters are RTL:

1. english one
2. english two

          EERHT WERBEH .3
           RUOF WERBEH .4

5.1. english five one

     OWT EVIF WERBEH .5.2
   EERHT EVIF WERBEH .5.3

Note: if an outline actually mixes both LTR and RTL headings, then the
entire outline should be rendered in a single major direction - i.e. if
most of the sections have English headings, then the section number
should appear to the left side also for Hebrew/Arabic headings. This
should probably be manually controlled, because you cannot do justice to
all possible cases if you try to automate it.

> Are there also languages that organize the text in vertical columns (instead
> of horizontal rows)?

Yes. Chinese and Japanese.

> What does a table of contents look like in that language(s)? (I ask that
> because a ToC is a reasonable approximation of what a collapsed outline looks
> like.)

I do not know.

> Hmm, and there are the ideo(?)graphic languages, I'm guessing that they can do
> a ToC very similar in manner to ours (if their ideographs) are organized in
> consecutive left to right (or right to left) lines.

I do not know.

> Any insites appreciated. Maybe collapsible outlining is more an english /
> european language thing only? (Or, at least, maybe it's not (easily)
> applicable in some languages?

Collapsible outlining applies also to RTL languages (such as Hebrew and
Arabic) without special problems.
                                          --- Omer

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