Righttoleft

Right-to-left (RTL) describes the orientation of text in which lines progress from right to left. It primarily applies to scripts that are traditionally written in that direction, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian (Farsi), Urdu, and Syriac, though some languages that use RTL scripts may also embed left-to-right elements. In RTL scripts, characters often form connected or cursive sequences, and punctuation and numerals can appear on the left within a line due to bidirectional typesetting.

In digital text, the final layout is determined by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, which assigns embedding levels to characters and resolves the order for rendering when RTL and LTR scripts share a line. Unicode provides control characters and directional formatting marks (such as RLE, LRE, PDF) and directional isolates; web and app frameworks use the CSS direction property and the dir attribute to indicate "rtl" or "ltr".

Practical considerations include mirroring user interface components, aligning text to the right, and ensuring proper cursor movement and punctuation handling. Numbers generally render left-to-right within RTL text, though newer fonts and rendering engines can integrate numeric shaping. The adoption of RTL support expanded with the growth of Arabic and Hebrew computing, and today major operating systems and web browsers provide extensive RTL support, though correct rendering can still require explicit direction controls and appropriate fonts.