I'm further realising that an additional problem might be that the character '<' in a right-to-left text would actually have the meaning of the character '>' in a left-to-right text. Is this so? In that case, it is not clear to me what exactly is the correct solution. E.g. what does XML standard say in this case? What do XML parsers do in practice? Are there separate Unicode points for some "directed" characters wrt. RTL/RTL? -- Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)