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Scenario

RTL scripts and character joining during IME composition (Arabic, Hebrew)

Arabic and Hebrew use right-to-left direction and contextual letter forms. During composition, joining rules, bidi isolation, and Safari vs Firefox may disagree—caret position and composed text can diverge from visual order.

ime
Scenario ID
scenario-ime-rtl-and-character-joining
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Details

Arabic and Hebrew use right-to-left direction and contextual letter forms. During composition, joining rules, bidi isolation, and Safari vs Firefox may disagree—caret position and composed text can diverge from visual order.

Problem Overview

dir="rtl" and mixed-direction spans inside contenteditable interact with IME pipelines that were often tested primarily on LTR Latin/CJK.

Observed Behavior

  • Arabic on Safari: character joining during composition (see cases).
  • Hebrew on Firefox: RTL composition quirks.

Impact

Misplaced caret, wrong glyph order, or selection that does not match user expectations.

References

Scenario flow

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Variants

Each row is a concrete case for this scenario, with a dedicated document and playground.

Case OS Device Browser Keyboard Status
ce-0179-arabic-ime-character-joining-safari macOS 14.0 Desktop or Laptop Any Safari 17.0 Arabic (IME) draft
ce-0207-hebrew-ime-rtl-composition-firefox Windows 11 Desktop or Laptop Any Firefox 120.0 Hebrew (IME) draft

Browser compatibility

This matrix shows which browser and OS combinations have documented cases for this scenario. Click on a cell to view the specific case.

Browser Windows macOS
Firefox
ce-0207-hebrew-ime-rtl-composition-firefox
120.0
—
Safari —
ce-0179-arabic-ime-character-joining-safari
17.0
Confirmed
Draft
— No case documented

Cases

This scenario affects multiple languages. Cases are grouped by language/input method below.

Arabic

1 case

Hebrew

1 case

Related Scenarios

Other scenarios that share similar tags or category.

Tags: ime, arabic, firefox

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IME candidate list timing and conversion (kanji, hanzi)

Japanese kanji conversion and Chinese character selection depend on the IME candidate window. Delays, wrong ordering, or Safari-specific lag can cause users to commit the wrong character or see candidates that do not match the underlying buffer—especially under load or in complex layouts.

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Duplicate beforeinput or input events during IME composition

Some browsers and keyboards emit duplicate composition-related input or beforeinput events—especially iOS Safari dictation paths and certain Android keyboards—so naive handlers that insert text on every input may double characters or corrupt state.

2 cases

Comments & Discussion

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