Wednesday, June 16th, 2021

Bidi

Hebrew and Arabic are read not right-to-left like most languages, but left-to-right. Support for text flowing in either direction is sometimes abbreviated bidi, short for bi-directional. More modern graphical frameworks have excellent bidi support, but older interface systems, like most terminals, tend not to.

Gemini Clients

This means many clients for Gemini simple do not support bidi and thus fail to display Hebrew and Arabic correctly. So while Gemini supports arbitrary character sets, and by default assumes utf-8, practically speaking the support is lacking.

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