This study focuses on the limitations of right-to-left (RTL) editing in the editing software oXygen and proposes practical methods for improving annotation input of Arabic text in TEI. Although the software provides an RTL display mode, the tagging workflow remains optimized for left-to-right languages, making rapid markup difficult and hindering researchers from creating TEI/XML of Arabic materials. To address this usability gap, this project explores layout-based strategies such as inserting line breaks at the word level, performing bottom-to-top range selections, and dividing text into smaller, directionally stable units to improve the efficiency of RTL annotation.

From the 18th century onward, Japan began to adopt practical knowledge, such as medicine, from the West, particularly from countries like the Netherlands. During this process, dictionaries of Japanese corresponding to Western languages were written, but there was a problem: Japanese is written vertically and read from right to left, while Western languages are written horizontally and read from left to right. Japanese scholars such as Yoan Udagawa experimented with various layouts to accommodate languages with different writing orientations on the same page. This progressed from the first stage, where Western languages were written horizontally and Japanese vertically on vertically ruled notebooks, to the fourth stage, still in use today, where Western languages were written horizontally and Japanese horizontally from left to right on horizontally ruled notebooks. While it can be argued that the traditional Japanese writing style has been lost, it offers great convenience, as both languages can be read in the same orientation.

Meanwhile, Yoan Udagawa conducted experiments on various layouts for Arabic text. This study, drawing inspiration from his ideas, employs methods such as arranging Arabic texts vertically with line breaks between each word and evaluates their usability to explore better methods for inputting mixed Eastern and Western language texts with TEI.