Supported Languages

The target language is Arabic. However, the technology implemented to address problems linked to Arabic can also be applied to similar languages, such as Urdu (Pakistan), Farsi (Iran), Hebrew, and Yiddish.

The Arabic language is bidirectional in that it is written from right to left but may include portions of text that are written from left to right. Also numerals in this language are written from left to right and can be expressed with the so called Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) or with the local numeric alphabet (Hindi).

The Arabic language is contextual in that it has a cursive writing, meaning that each letter in a word is attached to the preceding and the following one. Encoding tables for Arabic contain several graphic representations of the same abstract character, each corresponding to the position of the character inside a word, which can be one of the following: isolated, initial, final, or middle. In Hebrew, characters have a unique shape and although there are five different final characters, these are considered as separate full letters. Arabic characters are variable in length. Long characters are sometimes represented with several typographic glyphs.

Another common characteristic of these languages is that the stored information differs from that which is displayed. To a certain extent, other languages, such as Thai, Laotian, or Korean, have similarities with these languages. However, we have not verified whether the solutions suggested in this document for processing Arabic also apply to them.

Although the content of this document is valid for all the languages cited above (Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew, and Yiddish), all the examples in this document are based exclusively on Arabic to simplify its reading.