Do right-to-left scripts display properly in search results and detailed record pages?
There are 520 Arabic records in the blacklight demo index. Some of these have vernacular script. Are they displaying properly? Here's a particular record (but you can poke around with facets to find more) with vernacular:
http://demo.blacklightopac.org/catalog/2003546302
Has some vernacular displaying properly and some fields displaying with the "I don't know how to render this character" issues. Is it bad data?
For right-to-left scripts, it's tricky to display fields that have entries in both roman script and Hebrew/Arabic in an intelligible fashion - the concatenation order of the subfields isn't always intuitive. Stanford's symphony implementation does this correctly, though it took some work. I'm not sure how well the bl-demo index copes with this, or solrmarc, or ... you get the idea.
This may be an indexing issue, where designated "display" fields for 880s have to cope properly with right-to-left scripts. In Stanford's vufind implementation, I relied on java's BIDI and the ordering of MARC field concatenation. I got "mostly" there, as I recall. Bob Haschart may be able to improve on this.
Right-to-Left scripts: Arabic and Hebrew of course, but there are more!
A decent list of them is here:
http://www.ontopia.net/i18n/direction.jsp?id=rtl
And here's a lovely fact:
"Ideographic languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are more
flexible in their writing direction. They are generally written left-
to-right, or vertically top-to-bottom (with the vertical lines
proceeding from right to left). However, they are occasionally written
right to left. Chinese newspapers sometimes combine all of these
writing directions on the same page."
http://www.i18nguy.com/temp/rtl.html
Improvement
Open
Major
