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UNI-019 · Invisibles

LRM

The invisible compass that returns a passage to left-to-right reading.

When Latin text and Arabic or Hebrew text share a line, the punctuation at the borders belongs to no one, and the bidirectional algorithm chooses for it — sometimes badly. The LRM is a bodiless character whose only property is “I am left-to-right”.

Placed beside the ambiguous sign, it anchors the neighborhood: a “C++” quoted in an Arabic paragraph stops turning into “++C”. The entity is ‎.

Without LRM:  in Arabic, 'C++' may appear as '++C'
With LRM:     C++‎ — the mark anchors the punctuation leftward
No body, only direction.