How to handle mixed LtR and RtL scripts in tabulated lists

[Joost Kremers]

Hi,

I'm wondering if there is a good way to create tabulated lists 
that have both left-to-right and right-to-left scripts. I'm 
running into the problem that the rtl entries have the columns in 
the "wrong" order.

I'm putting "wrong" in quotes here, because for the actual rtl 
entry, the columns would be in the right order. It's just that 
mixing such entries with ltr entries yields bad results.

Details of the actual problem can be found in this Github issue:

https://github.com/joostkremers/ebib/issues/172

Basically, I'm creating a tabulated list of BibTeX entries, where 
each entry should have the columns "Key", "Author", "Year", 
"Title", in that order. However, entries that contain (in the 
example issue linked to) Hebrew text (specifically author name and 
title), the order of the columns ends up as (from left to right): 
"Key", "Title", "Year", "Author", the last three columns being in 
the "wrong" order compared to the ltr entries.

Currently, I'm using the built-in function 
`truncate-string-to-width` to create the rows of the tabulated 
list. (At the time I decided against using `tabulated-list-mode`, 
because I had some requirements that `tabulated-list-mode` didn't 
seem to handle. I don't remember the details...)

Is there a better way to this sort of thing? Should I be handling 
this differently?

TIA for any and all suggestions.


--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments