Authorizing bi-directional text

Starting from Service Manager 9.32, Service Request Catalog supports right-to-left direction for both Arabic and Hebrew language environments. However, without certain modifications, you may find that some text is displayed left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL). The following sections provide a brief introduction on bidirectional text, and show you how to input bidirectional texts in the Service Manager client.

Understanding an unexpected text order

Service Manager stores texts in Unicode encoding. Service Request Catalog displays texts by using the Unicode standard, which defines the order in which text should be displayed by specifying a particular base direction.

The base direction influences the order of the display of text of different directions, and the display of directionally-neutral text (i.e., characters or sequences of characters that do not have inherent directionality, as defined in the Unicode Character Standard).

In Service Request Catalog, if the language is Arabic or Hebrew, the base direction is RTL; otherwise, LTR.

For example, suppose a user writes the following text in English as the name of a catalog item. In an LTR language in Service Request Catalog, the text is displayed exactly as shown:

Printing (North America)

However, in a Hebrew or Arabic language environment, where the base direction is RTL, the text displays as follow:

(Printing (North America

This behavior occurs because a parenthesis is directionally neutral in the Unicode standard and does not have an inherent direction. The Unicode text engine first checks whether a parenthesis can inherit a direction the from surrounding text. If a parenthesis cannot inherit a direction from the surrounding text, it defaults to the base direction. In the example text, the first parenthesis is embedded in a single run of LTR text. Therefore, it adopts the direction of its surrounding text. The second parenthesis, which is at the end of the text, is not surrounded by text of a certain direction. Therefore, the second parenthesis defaults to the RTL base direction.

Thus, the text can be divided into two parts with different directions, wherein the first part is LTR:

Printing (North America

And, the second part is RTL:

(

Because “)” displays as “(” in the RTL direction, and the two divided text parts are ordered in the RTL base direction, the text is displayed as shown:

(Printing (North America

To resolve this issue, the Unicode standard contains two special characters that are used in bi-direction-enabled text.

Unicode character	Code	HTML	Name	Description
LRM	U+200E	‎ ‎ ‎	LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK	Left-to-right zero-width character
RLM	U+200F	‏ ‏ ‏	RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK	Right-to-left zero-width character

These zero-width invisible characters act as surrounding text. These characters enable directionally-neutral characters (such as parentheses) to inherit the correct direction from the surrounding text instead of defaulting to the base direction.

In the prior example, you can add a left-to-right mark after the second parenthesis to fix the problem as shown in the following example:

Printing (North America)LRM

Because both parentheses are surrounded by LTR text, the whole text is treated as a single run of LTR text. Therefore, the text is displayed as we want in Hebrew or Arabic environment:

Printing (North America)

There are other control characters related to bi-directional text in the Unicode standard which are rarely used. For full instruction on the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm and the related control characters, see the following links:

http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/uba-basics

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12173-bidi-paren.pdf

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/

Input bidirectional text in the Service Manager client

The text input boxes in the Service Manager clients use Unicode encoding. However, unlike other third-party text editing tools where you can easily insert a left-to-right mark or other Unicode control characters by using a keyboard shortcut or context menu, the Service Manager clients are somewhat limited.

You can use any of the following three methods to input bidirectional text in the Service Manager clients.

Copy from text editing tools (recommended)

If you are familiar with authoring bidirectional text, you probably have a text editing tool that you often use. You can copy previously-authored bidirectional text from your text editing tool and paste directly into the text input box in the Service Manager client.

Insert a single unicode control character

If you already have some text in Service Manager, and you just want to insert several LRM or RLM marks to make that text bidirectional, you can create these marks easily by using WordPad in Windows. To do this, use one of the following methods:

Method 1

1. Open a new document in WordPad.

2. Type 200E (200E is the hexadecimal code of LRM) and then press the Alt+X keyboard command. The “200E” should disappear and the LRM is inserted.

3. Press CTRL+A to select all, and then press CTRL+C so you can paste it back into Service Manager.

Method 2

1. Open a new document in Wordpad.

2. Press and hold the ALT key, and then type 8206 (the decimal code of LRM) by using the numeric keypad. When you release the ALT key, the LRM is inserted.

3. Press CTRL+A to select all, and then press CTRL+C so you can paste it back into Service Manager.

Rich text input box in Service Manager client

There are a few rich text input boxes in Service Manager client, such as the detailed description of Catalog items. Rich text input boxes have two editing modes: “normal” and “source”.

• In the “normal” mode, you can input bidirectional text as you would in other text input boxes.
• In the “source” mode, you must use the HTML escaped form of special Unicode characters. For example, to input a RLM (right-to-left mark), you should input one of the following:

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