Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel Nothman" <jnothman AT student.usyd.edu.au>]

> >
> Also I think you have to set up this key combination as an option  
> somewhere. It might be the default in XP. Probably it doesn't so much  
> shift from RTL to LTR or vice versa as shift between two different  
> keyboards, Hebrew and English if those are the two you have set up.  
> Things will be more complicated if you have more keyboards.

No, this is not what it does. Whether text and its punctuation should read  
right-to-left or left-to-right is independent of whether its text itself  
starts, ends with or contains left-to-right or right-to-left text.

So, for instance, in my WinXP setup, if I want to write a word in Hebrew  
amidst a paragraph of English text, I switch to the Hebrew keyboard  
mapping (by pressing left-alt-shift on my machine), type the word, and  
change back to english... Still, the paragraph itself is aligned left to  
right.

If I want to write a paragraph in Hebrew, maybe with some english words in  
it, I have to (1) change into Hebrew keyboard mapping so I can type and  
(2) make the paragraph right to left, by pressing right-ctrl-shift, so  
that the punctuation and word order is shown correctly.

Interestingly, I haven't found anywhere to change this keyboard shortcut.  
I haven't even found anywhere that tells me about it. I just found it by  
chance. Then again, I haven't been looking for it: I didn't expect such a  
feature to exist in all programs, so just put buttons on the word  
processing toolbar. But it turns out full right-to-left capability is  
available in essentially all text-boxes in WinXP etc.

- Joel


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