Know of any invisible right-to-left characters in Unicode?

Question

A common problem with right-to-left text and many text editors is that while the actual right-to-left characters are written right-to-left, the punctuation (nominally) following such a sentence is switched back to left-to-right mode again.

This results in, for example, Hebrew text not followed but preceeded by a question mark.

The problem can be dealt with by adding another right-to-left character after the punctuation. But that is certainly not a good solution.

So I am wondering whether there is an invisible right-to-left character in Unicode that I could add after punctuation at the end of right-to-left text in order to get the effect of adding another character but not the sight of it.

Any ideas?

Or any other ideas to solve the problem?

Answer 1

Does U+200F "RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK Right-to-left zero-width character" work? There's a few others listed at UAX #9: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm.

Answer 2

I believe that openoffice allows you to do this (Add the zero-width space) with a SPACE bar + one of the Meta keys. This is certainly the case in Lao and Thai scripts.