THE SMALL PRINTROOM · UNICODE WORKSHOP

Two directions.
One ribbon.

Turn logical text into visual order. A tiny hands-on lesson in how Hebrew, Latin letters and numbers share a line.

Study

How to play Tap the first and last tile of a span, then Reverse span. Match the printed proof below. Characters keep their identity; only their position changes. No Hebrew knowledge needed.

Your working ribbon left edge → right edge

Printed proof match the order of these tiles

Why do these tiles move?

Text is stored in logical order. Unicode assigns each character an embedding level: odd levels run right to left; even levels run left to right. To display a line, reverse continuous runs from the highest level down to the lowest odd level.

Numbers can form an even-level island inside a right-to-left run. Reversing the number island first, then the surrounding run, keeps the number readable.

This workshop uses the actual bidi-js implementation of Unicode 13.0. Tile numbers identify characters; the small L/R/EN tags show their directional class. The board displays individual unjoined characters, not full Hebrew text instruction or Arabic shaping.