In Aleph, when changin textdir outside a box, the textdir inside the box is not changed. For example: \textdir TRT \setbox0 = \hbox{textdir: \the\textdir , boxdir: \the\boxdir0} \box0 \bye In Aleph, bot will remain TLT. However, in Omega textdir inside the box will get updated to TRT as well. IMO, Omega behaviour makes more sense. The current behaviour just make things more complex. I spent several hours trying to debug why in the following latex example, the second section number is misplaced: \documentclass{article} \begin{document} \section{Test} \textdir TRT\pardir TRT \section{Test} \end{document} I turned out that latex buts section number inside an hbox, which is TLT here. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer