Berry and several of his students had successfully developed bi- and tri-directional versions of AT&T's device-independent formatter, TROFF. These versions are capable of formatting fully illustrated technical documents in the Latin-alphabet and other left-to-right alphabets, the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, and the Chinese and Japanese alphabets in the left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to-bottom directions.
Below are references to the older work in this area that is not covered in detail by the abstracts in these WEB pages.
Buchman, C., Berry, D.M., Gonczarowski, J. ``DITROFF/FFORTID: An Adaptation of the UNIX® DITROFF for Formatting Bi-Directional Text,'' Transactions on Office Informations Systems, 3:4, pp. 380-397, October, 1985
Habusha, U. and Berry, D.M. ``vi.iv, a Bi-Directional Version of the vi Full-Screen Editor,'' Electronic Publishing, Origination, Dissemination, and Design, 3:2, pp. 65-91, 1990 PDF ps.Z
Becker, Z. and Berry, D.M., ``triroff, An Adaptation of the UNIX ditroff for Formatting Tri-Directional Text,'' Electronic Publishing, Origination, Dissemination, and Design, 2:3, pp. 119-142, 1990 PDF FTP
Srouji, J. and Berry, D.M. ``Arabic Formatting with ditroff/ffortid,'' Technical Report, Faculty of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1993 PDF ps.Z
Srouji, J. and Berry, D.M. ``Arabic Formatting with ditroff/ffortid,'' Electronic Publishing, Origination, Dissemination, and Design, 5:4, pp. 163-208, December, 1992 PDF ps.Z
Berry, D.M. ``Stretching Letter and Slanted-Baseline Formatting for Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian with ditroff and Dynamic POSTSCRIPT Fonts,'' Technical Report, Faculty of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1998 PDF ps.Z
Berry, D.M. ``Stretching Letter and Slanted-Baseline Formatting for Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian with ditroff and Dynamic POSTSCRIPT Fonts,'' Software--Practice & Experience, 29:15, 1417-1457 1999 PDF ps.Z