The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm

The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm plays a critical role in ensuring that bidirectional text is correctly rendered.

Bidirectional text is text that contains text in both text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). Common examples of bidirectional text include the following:

  • Documents in RTL languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu, and Yiddish that include numerics or embedded sections of LTR text
  • Documents that contain text in both LTR and RLT languages, for example, a topic that lists the names of a movie in multiple languages

The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm specifies how text should be rendered for a given language. For more information about the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, see the following resources: