I.1 Introduction

Office Open XML was designed to work with multilingual documents. It is capable of fully representing the information needed for different languages and scripts, including bidirectional (bidi) scripts (such as Arabic or Hebrew). Those scripts are written from right-to-left (RTL), while numbers and segments of text in other scripts are embedded from left-to-right (LTR). The Office Open XML standard allows users to explicitly apply and define the bidirectional characteristics of objects and text properties.

This document describes the syntax used to define these properties, going from the highest level to the most specific—that is from the document to the character (i.e., a run) level. Note that there are no bidirectional settings which affect the whole document. To accomplish this, styles can be used to allow these settings to be changed in a single location, and used throughout the content.