Bidirectional

Use the Item subclass > Bidirectional property to define the data as bidirectional.

Certain languages that are read from right-to-left often contain numeric or other phrases that are read from left-to-right. This type of data is called "bidirectional" because it changes direction in the middle of a line.

The default setting is No.

To enable this setting, select Yes. When you enable this setting, additional options are available to further define the bidirectional data.

Text items

The Bidirectional subproperties for text item types provide options for symmetric swapping, ordering, orientation, and shaping.

Symmetric Swapping: Use this property to maintain the orientation of directional pairs of characters (such as parentheses, greater than/less than symbols, brackets, braces).

Ordering Scheme: This property pertains to the order of the data as stored in memory.; Logical, the default setting, indicates that the data is stored in memory from left-to-right, regardless of the orientation of the text. Using the Visual ordering scheme, the data is read and stored with the start character in the right-most position both visually and in memory.

Orientation: Orientation pertains to the direction of the text as read visually. The default direction is left-to-right (LTR), meaning the text object is read starting from the left. The direction can be right-to-left (RTL), meaning the object is read starting from the right. When you select RTL, the behavior of some text functions (such as LEFT, RIGHT, MID) can change.

Use the Contextual LTR and Contextual RTL settings when the orientation should be taken from the context of the data because the data contains "strong" characters that are either orientation left or orientation right. When no strong characters are present in the data, the orientation will be based on this setting.

For example, when you set the orientation to Contextual LTR and no strong characters are encountered (meaning the data is orientation-neutral), the data orientation will be considered left-to-right.

Text Shaping: Use this property to produce output in a different glyph (shape or bit pattern). The default setting is off, or Unshaped.; To enable text shaping, select Shaped. The output will be shaped according to the code page of the target object.

Character number items

For character number item types, you can additionally define a numeric shaping characteristic.

Numeric Shaping: Use this property to indicate whether the output of numeric values will have the shapes that are used in English (Arabic digits 0123456789) or the national numerical shapes.; The default setting is Regular, which means Arabic digits (0123456789). Otherwise, select Arabic-Indic (٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩).

The Bidirectional property is not applicable to binary numbers.