The Swing Bidi cursor apparently follows the allignment property and not the base level embedding direction. This almost always results in the visual cursor moving in the opposite direction to the actual cursor. Position the visual cursor near the left end of a Hebrew sentence and enter some text. The text appears in the corresponding position towards the right end of the text, far away from where the visual cursor is. If you add in the font metric problems described in 4222919 and try to select some Arabic text, the repainting results are phychedelic. Lots of fun but probably not what the doctor ordered.