Hi Tony,

Wow, what an interesting tool this is:
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/utility/bidi.jsp

Unfortunately, in my case the parentheses are likely to be just regular text
and I have no direct way of knowing whether they surround Arabic or Western
text (other than trying to find some all-purpose magic XPath analyzing
basically every text() node). But the content inside the parentheses is tagged
as non-translateable and I can take advantage of that.

<p>ARABIC <nt>Brand name</nt> (<nt>Former name</nt>) TEXT.</p>

By playing around with the tool (and without proper understanding of the
rules) I find some options that would make the parentheses correct, but the
preceding or following Arabic text will be ordered in the wrong way.

I have the impression that direction control characters in this situation do
not as well as <fo:bidi-override> would work. Unfortunately I have not heard
back, whether the presentation as

.TXET (Former name) Brand name CIBARA

is accepted by the client.

- Michael

BTW: I hope this is still on topic enough. That's why I mentioned XPath.


> Am 03.05.2016 um 14:21 schrieb Tony Graham tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> tldr: Put &#x200E; after the ')'.

> As Michael notes below, some characters, such as Latin letters, have a
> 'strong' directionality, and some have a 'weak' or 'neutral'
> directionality. The closing ')' is a 'neutral', and because it's at the
> end of the string, it takes the 'embedding direction' [5], which is RTL
> in Michael's example. You can see this with the bidi utility at
>
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/utility/bidi.jsp?a=Brand+name+%28Former+name%E2%8
0%8E%29&p=RTL

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