Comment 15 for bug 325324

I am sorry, you wrong.

DOS never had Hebrew support and the characters set was limited to Extended ASCII (8 bit). Linux terminal is much more powerful and can support wide range of characters and styles. As for printers, the main reason you see them running on DOS operating system and using pinhead printers is because only there they have good support for Hebrew characters. Trust me, I know what I am talking about, I was administrating the computers for such companies until few years ago.

As for Linux - Please never translate programs in visual order characters, as this will cause everyone troubles when they will try more advanced things, such as showing that text inside software which is capable for showing unicode characters and has BiDi support. It is possible that in case you have dpkg translated, for example, you will see Hebrew text reversed inside update-manager and synaptic. Since you don't want to break GUI programs, you should not use visual order texts.

The previous decision in Debian have been decided by talent people. You should not change this without first asking them for advice, even if you own a distribution, since this will make bad experience for users.

You can, however, create a separate bugs for enabling BiDi support in gnome-terminal and every other console/terminal application, but until most of the application have stable BiDi support you should not place dirty hacks such as reversing text.