Support is provided in OS/2 Version 2.0 for national languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, which require video display output and printer output to be presented for reading from left-to-right or right-to-left, and for the nesting of phrases in either direction. This bidirectional support is used in conjunction with the Hebrew and Arabic codepages, and uses a bidirectional video device handler (VDH) and a bidirectional printer monitor. This VDH is chained to the device-specific VDH and handles all the bidirectional aspects of the video output.
This support is only available for full-screen screen groups.
The bidirectional language support provided in OS/2 Version 2.0 will support those countries with country codes 785 (Arabic) and 972 (Hebrew), and which use either codepages 864 (Arabic) or 862 (Hebrew) as the primary codepage. These countries may also use either codepage 437 or 850 as a secondary codepage.
A number of function calls are provided to allow querying and setting of bidirectional screen group attributes and the manipulation of character strings from within applications. This enables the development of bidirectional aware applications.