Editing Bidirectional text (section)

== Bidirectional script support ==
{{anchor|Unicode support}}<!-- used externally -->
Bidirectional script support is the capability of a [[computer]] system to correctly display bidirectional text. The term is often shortened to "'''BiDi'''" or "'''bidi'''".

Early computer installations were designed only to support a single [[writing system]], typically for left-to-right scripts based on the [[Latin alphabet]] only. Adding new [[character set]]s and [[character encoding]]s enabled a number of other left-to-right scripts to be supported, but did not easily support right-to-left scripts such as [[Arabic script|Arabic]] or [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]], and mixing the two was not practical. Right-to-left scripts were introduced through encodings like [[ISO/IEC 8859-6]] and [[ISO/IEC 8859-8]], storing the letters (usually) in writing and reading order. It is possible to simply flip the left-to-right display order to a right-to-left display order, but doing this sacrifices the ability to correctly display left-to-right scripts. With bidirectional script support, it is possible to mix characters from different scripts on the same page, regardless of writing direction.

In particular, the [[Unicode]] standard provides foundations for complete BiDi support, with detailed rules as to how mixtures of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts are to be encoded and displayed.