Scope of Bidirectional Support

The PM bidirectional support has been designed with the following main design objectives:

• Allow creation of bidi-aware applications.

• Allow as easy as possible conversion of bidi-unaware applications to being bidi-aware.

• Allow usage of bidi-unaware applications in the National Language. The extent to which this is possible is largely dependent on the application itself.

Thus, the full bidirectional support is provided to applications which make active use of the PM Bidirectional services (APIs, PM messages etc). In addition, a certain degree of support is also provided for bidi-unaware applications. Depending on the application, this support (for bidi-unaware) may provide various degrees of usability for the application when working with Arabic or Hebrew.

The Bidirectional support in PM is provided in the Arabic and Hebrew language versions of OS/2. The support is active/configured when the COUNTRY selection during OS/2 installation is Arabic or Hebrew in these versions.