How are line breaks handled in bidirectional messages containing both English and Hebrew?

Question

I have some Hebrew (right-to-left) text within an English (left-to-right) text as such:

The Hebrew text (right-to-left) by itself looks like this:

When the paper does not have enough width, the Hebrew text would wrap naturally as such:

What's the correct way to write the text when there is not enough space to finish the right-to-left quote in a single line?

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Option A:

(note that we have to read the Hebrew text from bottom-up if this is the case)

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Option B:

(aligning the start-of-line of the Hebrew text)

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Option C:

(same as Option B but compacted left)

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Option D:

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Option E:

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Answer 1

As a reader of Hebrew, I can tell you that the many times I've encountered such scenarios, it's been written with Option D, which is by far much easier to read. It is more natural to the reader, and this seems to be the norm in virtually all publications I've encountered.

In social media, and even on SE sites, it is very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to render it this way, and the result is something that appears to be gobbeldygook and takes a good deal of effort, sometimes even requiring contacting the writer, to decipher.

Answer 2

I say option D.

When in doubt, you can try what Web browsers do. They have touchy algorithms to handle this kind of cases, and not all Web browsers render them correctly. Firefox is quite good at it.

Richard Ishida has a good page of explanations where you can test your Web browsers. It's fun when it comes to numbers and parentheses.

Here are more detailed insights.

Answer 3

TL;DR: Option D is the answer, and Option E may be an answer with minor corrections.

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I am affiliated with a company that develops a formatting engine, so let me tell how we do it in printing industry.

The decision point comes from an understanding of Unicode sequence, and difference of RTL (Right-to-Left) Unicode sequences to a plain text.

In a Unicode text, you will have the following sequence of character codes. E.g., The title says, then space and quotation mark, and then the string "פעילות הבינאום" in their natural, RTL, order:

• פ
• ע
• י

and so on.

So, when a rendering engine performs typesetting, it takes those characters in their natural order:

• It takes an English text;
• a space;
• a quotation mark;
• ⁽¹⁾ Note, there is no breakable space here
• and the first Hebrew word, פעילות, starting from "פ";
• then it takes another space symbol;
• and then it finds out that the second Hebrew word, הבינאום, does not fit into the first printable line.
• The rendering engine takes whatever fits and breaks the line at the nearest break location (a breakable space between the two Hebrew words).
• Then it starts processing glyphs within the line: English text is rendered with LTR rules, while Hebrew text is rendered with RTL rules.

This distinction within the line (RTL vs. LTR) can be resolved in a different manner. Some formatting standards assume detection by text codepage; others, like XSL-FO, are being specifically instructed by writing-mode property.

So it will be naturally Option D.

You should also consider that RTL does not imply Bottom-to-Top. This is why Option A is not relevant.

Note that Option E is essentially the same as Option D, only having text alignment set to both, except that the quotation mark will be aligned together with the first word of the Hebrew text since there is no breakable space in ⁽¹⁾.

I must admit that you have prepared your question very well, so I don't even need screenshots! :)