Smart Punctuation is incorrect on RTL direction

[aleemb]

Version(s) affected

2.3

Description

In RTL languages the smart punctuation should be reversed so 'رہیں' generates ’رہیں‘ instead of the desired ‘رہیں’.

It's possible to change up the config to reverse the open/close but language detection (especially for bilingual setups) would be very useful.

[colinodell]

Thanks for raising this issue!

Unfortunately, proper RTL support hasn't been introduced into the CommonMark spec yet :-/ For example, there's a known issue where using the RTL mark can break emphasis. There are also several unresolved discussions about RTL support like this one.

I unfortunately don't know much about the intricacies of text direction in Unicode, but I suspect that the ideal solution would probably involve detecting the direction within the Unicode character stream (and perhaps being able to set a default direction for documents), and using that to determine how smart punctuation should work. This would probably be more accurate (and perhaps more efficient too) than trying to detect languages.