"Michael Latta" <lattam at mac.com> asked:

> Does Morphic support editing of bidirectional text?  The java 
> frameworks place a high emphasis on this, and I would like to know if 
> similar support was included in the internationalization of Squeak?
> 
As nobody else answered this question, I will do it:
Squeak does not currently support bidirectional text processing.
This is true for both the MVC framework and the Morphic
framework.
When Smalltalk was created, bidirectional text processing was not
an issue at all. Until very recently bidirectionality was also not an issue
for Squeak: Squeak used its own fonts that do not support
scripts that are written from right to left. Now that we are in the
process to add Unicode support to Squeak, we will have to
think about BIDI support, too.

Regrettably, bidi support is not an easy thing to implement. The
most difficult thing is certainly the support for arabic. For arabic
it is not sufficient to simply display glyphs from right to left, you
have also to choose the correct presentation forms. Personally
I fear that support for arabic presentation forms will further slow
down the performance of text display routines, which is of
course not desireable.

Greetings, Boris