[bitwize]

What about l-r vs r-l text? What about mixtures of l-r and r-l in the same document?

Supporting Unicode half-assed may be relatively easy. Supporting it properly is hard, and requires a team of experts. I doubt even John Cowan is enough an expert in all the fiddly little corner cases to do it all himself.

But you still have to do it.

Thankfully, there is libpango and libharfbuzz, which take care of many of these details for you.