Comment 7 for bug 636747

rabic should be slanted to the left with the writing direction, which is how it is slanted in handwriting and how carefully designed Arabic fonts are slanted. Slanting it to the right, though might look acceptable for a solitary word in the middle of a Latin paragraph, looks very odd for a paragraph of only Arabic or dominated by Arabic text, it just looks like poor artificial slanting.

However, when mixing slanting direction, there is the problem with common symbol s like {[(|)]} which should either not slanted at all or better be context sensitive using "right to left alternates" feature ('rtla') which is, fortunately, supported by Pango at least.