Hi, This is concerning an RTL text. I have one chapter and 10 sections under that. My goal is to achieve the following. 1) The number 10 should appear correctly with '1' visually to the left of '0'. 2) The chapter number should visually appear to the right of the section number. 3) Chapter and section numbers should be separated with a dash. (This is ignored in this email and I will follow up about it in another thread. To get a minimal working example, I also do not try to change the numbers to use Persian digits.) In particular, the headings will be visually something like the following (aligned to the right). elpmas 1 txet 1-1 txet 2-1 txet 3-1 ... txet 10-1 Here's the first attempt. %% Attempt 1 \setupalign[r2l] \starttext \placecontent \chapter{sample} \dorecurse{10}{\section{text}} \stoptext The result is: elpmas 1 txet 1-1 ... txet 01-1 Then I add "\setupdirections[bidi=global,method=default]" to the beginning and I get the most strange result (number right-aligned but texts left-aligned): sample 1 text 1.1 ... text 1.10 A third attempt gives almost what I want (without period as the separator). %% Attempt 3 \setupalign[r2l] \def\LTR#1{{\lefttoright#1}} \def\leftnumbers#1{\LTR{\numbers{#1}}} \defineconversion[leftnumbers][\leftnumbers] \setuphead[chapter,title,section,subject] [conversion=leftnumbers] \starttext \placecontent \chapter{sample} \dorecurse{10}{\section{text}} \stoptext The big problem is that in my RTL documents, I always have the setupdirections command, which messes things up here. (This makes it difficult to one section name with English title, which should still be typeset on the right-hand side of the page.) Note that in attempt 2 above, there were two issues: (1) Text and numbers appeared on the two far ends of the screen instead of being close to each other. This does not happen when I use Farsi text. (2) Chapter number appears to the left of section number. %% Attempt 5 \usemodule[simplefonts] \setmainfont[ALM Fixed][features=arabic,range=arabic] \setupdirections[bidi=global,method=default] \setupalign[r2l] \starttext \placecontent \chapter{نمونه} \dorecurse{10}{\section{متن}} \stoptext Interestingly the table of contents looks fine if I put the number inside an LTR macro; still in the main body, the section heads are typeset incorrectly. %% Attempt 6 \usemodule[simplefonts] \setmainfont[ALM Fixed][features=arabic,range=arabic] \setupdirections[bidi=global,method=default] \setupalign[r2l] \def\LTR#1{{\lefttoright#1}} \def\leftnumbers#1{\LTR{\numbers{#1}}} \defineconversion[leftnumbers][\leftnumbers] \setuphead[chapter,title,section,subject] [conversion=leftnumbers] \starttext \placecontent \chapter{نمونه} \dorecurse{10}{\section{متن}} \stoptext I guess the solution is to get the entire section head number string (e.g., 1.10) to have RTL direction, however, each individual number string inside (say, 1 or 10) should be written LTR. How can this be achieved? The six TeX files (with corresponding PDF outputs) are attached. BTW this is using ConTeXt ver: 2016.04.01 13:01 MKIV beta fmt: 2016.4.7 int: english/english, running LuaTeX, Version beta-0.90.0 (TeX Live 2016) on Mac OS X. Thanks a lot, —MHB