[250 new] Style: discerning right-to-left italic slant direction

For the record, my view is that we want mixed ltr and rtl text to feel
good. The font will not be used exclusively in any one language, it will
mostly be used in mixed environments (a tech-savvy audience will use the
web a lot). Therefor, optimising for mixed environments is reasonable,
and likely trumps single-language conventions. So I would slant to the
right for Hebrew, so mixed Latin and Hebrew italics feel natural.

Mark

As an Arabic (rtl like Hebrew) user I think they should be in the same direction to feel normal , here is an example with mixed Arabic and Latin in the attachment

Another example in full paragraph .

I hope this be a reference for Arabic :)

foxoman: I meant to say this sooner, but the Arabic looks beautiful like that doesn't it, I'm looking forward to the Arabic inclusion in the Ubuntu Font Family and where Dalton Maag can take the type design!

thanks waiting for the arabic support :)

My comment was about take the same decision on all RTL language (Hebrew , Arabic ) , so they will look nice when mixing with other LTR or even with another RTL language like mixing Arabic + Hebrew + Latin :)

As a Hebrew user I can tell that it's common to use the ////// way, which I
personally prefer.

rabic should be slanted to the left with the writing direction, which is how it is slanted in handwriting and how carefully designed Arabic fonts are slanted. Slanting it to the right, though might look acceptable for a solitary word in the middle of a Latin paragraph, looks very odd for a paragraph of only Arabic or dominated by Arabic text, it just looks like poor artificial slanting.

However, when mixing slanting direction, there is the problem with common symbol s like {[(|)]} which should either not slanted at all or better be context sensitive using "right to left alternates" feature ('rtla') which is, fortunately, supported by Pango at least.

Marking as Low because italic is uncommon in Arabic to begin with, and artificial oblique works.