Opened 15 years ago
Last modified 14 years ago
#9045 new enhancement
Add support for RTL languages
| Reported by: | Christian Boos | Owned by: | |
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| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | translations |
| Component: | i18n | Version: | 0.12dev |
| Severity: | major | Keywords: | rtl |
| Cc: | itamarost@…, jun66j5@… | Branch: | |
| Release Notes: | |||
| API Changes: | |||
| Internal Changes: | |||
Description
This will be useful for e.g. Hebrew (#9040).
We need to add the possibility to reverse some parts of the layout. Changing the base direction (<html dir="rtl">) is a first step, but seems to be far from enough.
Maybe one approach could be to add some CSS classes the containers that need to have their content reversed and have a Genshi filter to do the job?
left/right should also be exchanged in the CSS, where relevant. Some techniques for achieving this are described in http://whatsup.org.il/meir/talks/django-i18n/django-i18n.html.
Some more background info in http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml.
Attachments (1)
Change History (6)
comment:1 by , 15 years ago
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comment:3 by , 15 years ago
Another reference - The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/
Relevant ticket on trac-hacks on RTL-support in Wysiwyg plugin: http://trac-hacks.org/ticket/6164
As I commented on the trac-hacks ticket, good RTL-support is very important for my organization, and I am interested in contributing to this purpose. I am able to set up Trac development environment (currently on Windows with Eclipse Pydev), and I would appreciate some assistance from core developers (or anyone else for that matter) on where to start and how to go about implementing such a thing.
Some thoughts I have on the issue, from the viewpoint of a bidirectional user:
Editing is a painful issue in the current state of affairs. When writing bidi-text, the user is forced to use plaintext editing (see the Wysiwyg plugin ticket on that issue):
- then begins the guessing game (e.g. "where should I put the cursor if I want to insert text between these words?", or "what region should I *try* to mark if I actually intend to mark *that*?")
- and the reverse engineering (how am I going to construct that paragraph so I comes out as I initially intended?).
- I have attached a screenshot of the Gmail rich-text-editor as an example of a web-based textarea with good bidi-handling:
- I must wonder — is this behavior browser-specific? (I'm using Firefox)
Display is probably the "main issue":
- currently, to produce RTL output we use this method:
{{{ #!div dir="rtl" my right-to-left-content goes here }}} and some left-to-right content goes hereleaving aside the fact that the need to use this markup is difficult for non-technical users, it prevents using the Wysiwyg plugin, and still does not provide good enough output. - RTL support will be needed even when the selected Trac-wide language is not RTL-script (I prefer the English user interface but want to be able to read RTL-formatted pages).
- When RTL-script is chosen as Trac-wide language, it should be "smart" enough to keep LTR formatting where appropriate (e.g. think about the TOC plugin: the TOC box should float on the left for RTL pages and on the right for LTR pages, regardless of the chosen script).
- The Trac admin should be able to set a default directionality for created pages, and the users should be able to override the default directionality within their sessions.
- As in the Gmail example, the directionality should be settable per-paragraph.
- Given the above, probably setting the top level <html dir="rtl"> depending on user-chosen-language does not suffice, as it might mess pages that are LTR.
- The directionality should probably be an attribute of render-able resources (e.g. wiki page & paragraph, navbar, ticket description, ticket comment, changeset comment, query & report, …), with child-resources inheriting from parents unless overridden.
(sorry for the long comment…)
comment:4 by , 15 years ago
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comment:5 by , 14 years ago
CSSJanus does a pretty good job at RTL-ing CSS. I don't think it'll get it 100% right, but its much easier continuing from there. See also Google's post about that.
Adding self to Cc.