Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 17/04/2004 18:28, Joel Nothman wrote:

> > >
> > 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
Interesting. I hadn't come across this one either. Does it work even in 
Notepad? It doesn't in my Windows 2000. Something of the sort works in 
Wordpad, but not exactly as you describe e.g. shift + right alt switches 
the keyboard to Hebrew, and some combination made the paragraph right 
aligned but I'm not sure what.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/