[libreoffice-design] Proposed design meeting discussion: Extrinsic vs intrinsic paragraph direction

I propose we devote a time slot during one of our upcoming design 
meetings (but not during the next two weeks, so we would have some 
heads-up for more people to join perhaps) to discuss the issue of 
direction as an intrinsic/intentional vs an extrinsic/extensional 
property of paragraphs or of text more generally.

This issue has come up recently in:

Bug 168537: DF RTL followed by "Clear DF" retains RTLness, aligns left
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168537

and has brought up the matter from:

Bug 40496: "Clear Direct Formatting" clears RTL directionality
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40496

with additional discussion found on

Bug 58070: Switching paragraph styles removes explicit text direction choice
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58070

Briefly:

One can often deduce the intended horizontal writing direction (i.e. LTR 
vs RTL; I'm ignoring vertical text progression here) of a piece of text 
from the content itself, without any formatting indication. And that 
happens in many contexts, including text editors and viewers, UI text 
edit controls, email clients etc.

However - the direction is often not possible to determine "correctly", 
as the text may be acceptable as either LTR or RTL, often depending on 
wider context. Also, the "technical status quo" in ODF as a standard and 
LibreOffice as an app is, that direction is an aspect of text 
formatting, set explicitly (or inherited) and separately from the content.

The discussion might map out some of the clashes of these two facts, and 
consider what the right approach to settle or address them should be. As 
we're talking about a design meeting, this will not focus on ODF, but 
potential changes to it might stem from UI/UX suggestions. See, for 
example,

Bug 162120 - Auto-detect paragraph directions when they were not set 
explicitly
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162120

and my comment #13 there in particular.

So, what say you?

---------------------------------

PS - Let me clarify that this is _not_ the subject of making text 
language be an aspect of content rather than formatting. The two 
subjects are separate, and while they have some similarities, they are 
also quite different.







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