Why don Hebrew and Arabic text look right in the demo?
The short answer is that you’re probably running the demo under JDK 1.1 rather than JDK 1.2. Most browsers currently (as of early 1999) do not yet support JDK 1.2. To see the demo in its full glory, install JDK 1.2 on your machine if you have not yet done so, download this package, and run the demo under 1.2. If you want the whole story, read on…. Arabic and Hebrew are both right to left languages. Each line of text starts at the right side of the page and flows to the left. When right to left text is mixed with a left to right language such as English, (e.g. an Arabic month name followed by the decimal year number) you ge bi-directional (or bidi) text, which has complicated rules for reordering characters based on their context. JDK 1.2 and later have good support for bi-directional text, thanks in part to work done by IBM. However, JDK 1.1.x does not support bidi text itself and simply passes text strings to the underlying OS. If you are running on an OS that supports bidi, such as
