Those languages aren't Right-to-Left, they're Bidirectional!!!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/02/14 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/02/14/10393578.aspx


Generally speaking, everyone knows software has bugs.

There is one class of bugs that, while important to fix, won't mislead or cause wrong decisions to be made.

Like this one that just came in:

I noticed the prices of these apps are listed in reverse order in Windows 2012 Arabic LPK.

For example the price of World Atlas is listed as $99.1 instead of $1.99.

Is this a known issue?


It's funny how we always call Arabic and Hebrew "Right-to-Left" languages.

They aren't.

They are Bidirectional!

Numbers, for example, are expected to be read from left to right in Hebrew and Arabic.

Even when the letters are definitely expected to flow from right to left!

Now of course it's important for them to fix the bug (it's a very recent regression, for what it's worth - and maybe it doesn't always happen anyway).

But no one will misread the amounts.

At most, they will do a double take and put a picture on Tumbler to share with friends.

I don't have a Tumbler account, so I'll just share it with all of you! :-)


Evan on 14 Feb 2013 9:42 AM:

What's going on with "Where's my Water?", or should I say "؟Where's my Water" then?

Alex Cohn on 14 Feb 2013 11:48 AM:

Especially bidirectional is "?Where's My Water"!

Paul on 15 Feb 2013 1:42 AM:

What is the usual behaviour with stars out of 5, these ones have also be reversed but I don't know if that is expected?


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