Re: makeinfo should quote 'like this' instead of `like this'

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:33:26 +0100
> From: Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
> 
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 08:21:45PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > OK, but then what exactly did you mean to convey by saying that the
> > format is implicitly left to right?  Text is always stored in a file
> > in the logical left to right order, and is processed by any program in
> > that order.
> 
> The chunks of text are indeed not necessarily oriented, but menu entries
> and node entries are oriented left to right.  In
> 
> * MENU-ENTRY-NAME: NODE-NAME.   DESCRIPTION
> 
> it seems to me that the menu entry parts are more or less left to right.

If they were made of right-to-left letters (e.g., Arabic), they would
display right to left, starting at the right margin of the display
window.  (You can try it in Emacs 24, for example.)  That's what
readers of the bidirectional scripts expect.

> Of course it could be displayed otherwise.  Maybe since this order is somewhat
> arbitrary, it could indeed only considered as data organization convention 
> not and as text.

The order of text, as far as software is concerned, is always the same
as the order in which the text is typed or read.  The display order,
by contrast, can be something entirely different, but that's a
display-time feature, meant for consumption by humans only.