Re: [Groff] Issue with Groff (Right-to-left support)

[Ali Gholami Rudi]

(Ted Harding) <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 25-Jun-2014 10:16:13 Russell Hyer wrote:
> > I am writing to ask whether anyone on this list knows about any
> > built in right-to-left support for Groff (without having to resort
> > to hacks like using sed to reverse streams of characters)[1].
> > One of the reasons I mention this, is that there was a document or
> > a mini solution (perhaps?) provided on the groff mailing list a
> > number of years back - but trying to search the web for modern and
> > relevant information seems to be fraught with the wrong answers
> > (or just bad info).
> 
> It could be interesting to see if others have knowledge of more
> recent developments! Unfortunately troff/groff itself is LTR oriented
> in its internal workings, and can drop the dish on the floor when
> trying to serve up RTL text (especially when RTL segments are embedded
> in a mainly LTR text -- e.g. you are writing in English but quoting
> Arabic or Hebrew -- line breaks can be a major problem here).
> 
> Many (about 25) years ago there was a version called ffortid
> (i.e. RTL "ditroff"). I did try this for a while, but did not manage
> to get used to it!

There is also the dir branch of neatroff, my troff implementation.
See http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf for an overview of neatroff
and http://litcave.rudi.ir/dir.html for text direction requests.

        Ali