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Question RTL screen formatting issues

  • muadh
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12 years 4 months ago #1 by muadh
RTL screen formatting issues was created by muadh
In RTL languages, for the screen formatting to be displayed correctly, all the text in the screen's user interface should be in a RTL language but the data itself can be mixed. If not so then some of the pages, lists, forms and charts will not be aligned properly.

For test purposes, you can use either Arabic or Hebrew translation. (all screen messages are translated in both).

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12 years 4 months ago #2 by fisharebest
Replied by fisharebest on topic Re: RTL screen formatting issues
We know there are several issues with mixed LTR/RTL.

Our Hebrew translator has been telling us about this for years.... ;-)

However, it is a very difficult (impossible?) problem to fix using HTML4. HTML4 has no support for what is called "inline bi-directional isolation".

This is fixed in HTML5, and we can use the <bdi></bdi> tags, or the style="unicode-bidi:isolate" attribute.

I am starting to add this markup to the code.

Unfortunately, only the latest versions of firefox/chrome/safari support it. Opera has plans to support it soon. No current version of IE supports it.

FYI, you can check your own browser by visiting this page: www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_bdi.asp and clicking the "try it" button. If the arabic text and the colon are positioned correctly, then your browser is good.

Historically, we have tried to avoid constructs that cause problems with mixed LTR/RTL. We have also tried to use logic that analyses the text, and guesses where to insert non-printing characters. This can help a little in some cases, but can never be entirely reliable.

But ultimately, I think we must wait for browsers to catch up with the standards.

Finally, welcome to webtrees, and thank-you for the time you have spent on the translation so far!

webtrees has approximately 4500 messages that need translating, and some contain a page of text. It is a lot of work!

I have already added Arabic to the list of "official" languages, and it will be included in the next release (1.2.5).

Greg Roach - greg@subaqua.co.uk - @fisharebest@phpc.social - fisharebest.webtrees.net

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  • muadh
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12 years 4 months ago #3 by muadh
Replied by muadh on topic Re: RTL screen formatting issues
All screen formatting works great in Arabic, and in Hebrew at least using Chrome.
The only exception I found so far is in one screen, (admin_site_config.php) in any RTL language.

One condition that should always apply, insert a white space between any field descriptive text and its value unless seperated by punctuation marks, also when using variables while composing narrative sentences.

This way words will not join together and become entirely another different word, this becomes more apparent in cursive alphabets (joined-up writing like Arabic and Farsi).

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  • muadh
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12 years 4 months ago #4 by muadh
Replied by muadh on topic Re: RTL screen formatting issues

fisharebest wrote: We know there are several issues with mixed LTR/RTL.

FYI, you can check your own browser by visiting this page: www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_bdi.asp and clicking the "try it" button. If the arabic text and the colon are positioned correctly, then your browser is good.


You know what, the example they show as incorrect, is actually the correct syntax.

"usernames are shown along with the number of points in a contest. If the bdi element is not supported in the browser, the username of the Arabic user would confuse the text (the bidirectional algorithm would put the colon and the number "90" next to the word "User" rather than next to the word "points")."

User hrefs: 60 points
User jdoe: 80 points
User إيان: 90 points

It will be wrong if you read continuously LTR, but it should be read LTR for english then RTL for arabic and then back to LTR for english, if not then it will mean that User # 90 is usemname points.

Anyhow I didn't see this issue apparent in webtrees.

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