[itayperl]

BiDi sucks, and as an RTL language speaker you learn to live with it.

My native language is Hebrew, and we don't bother translating most technical terms to Hebrew. You end up with technical documents looking something like this:

".yadot patch a desaeler Apple .iOS 9.3 ni ytilibarenluv privilege-escalation a dnuof srehcraeser ehT"

In newspapers, where lines are typically short, you get the effect in the screenshot in question. E.g.:

   "Everyone gets a day .ni tnew eH
            .dias eh ",off tomorrow

You can't really get used to that. You actually have to read the second line sideways from the middle!

By the way, typing mixed text is even worse than reading it. You have to press alt+shift every 2-3 words to switch layout. If that's not bad enough, Office 2007 (if I'm not mistaken) introduced a 0.5-1sec lag after each keyboard layout switch. Imagine typing out an entire document like that. I lost my nerve a couple of times.

In many cases we avoid this issue by simply writing technical documents in English, but sometimes that's not an option.

[Osmium]

Thanks for this – I really appreciate the insight. That changing-input lag sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Since I left my previous comment, I came across some Apple presentations on new work they've been doing in iOS 9 and iOS 10 on internationalisation including RTL and mixed-content support. It sounds like there's a lot of work still to do, but I was pleased to see they've at least started multilingual input sources now (in iOS 10, autocorrect can work with multiple languages without having to switch keyboards, though I'm guessing this only works with Latin alphabet languages for now?).