RTL African scripts include N'Ko, Adlam, & Ajami.

This issue asks questions about the requirements for oblique text in these scripts, and provides preliminary text for a gap-analysis topic. (There is a similar issue for Standard Arabic/Persian at w3c/alreq#93.)

Questions

RTL italicised text for Arabic and Hebrew can be found leaning to the left, rather than to the right as in English.

[Q1] In what direction should African RTL text lean when oblique?

The Jamra-Patel site has a couple of nice examples of italicised text. First, N'Ko, where text leans to the left:

The example of italicised Adlam text, however, leans to the right:

[Q2] Should embedded Latin (or other LTR) text lean to the left or right, when the surrounding text leans to the left?

Here's an example in Standard Arabic:

Support on the Web

Unless a font comes with an italic or oblique face, slanted text on the Web will be produced synthetically by the browser skewing the text. I think i'm safe in saying that no mechanism is currently specified in any browser for left-leaning skews, but provision for it is made in the CSS Fonts Level 4 draft.

I'm not aware of any tests for this behaviour, but i may write some, if time allows.

Prioritisation of this gap

Third question:

[Q3] Is slanted/oblique/italicised text a common feature of these scripts. Do users expect to have it and use it regularly, or is it perhaps an artefact of Western-based digitalization whose need is not felt by users of these scripts?

What colour would we use to describe this situation in the Language Matrix?