RTL text support

[tanriol]

As I don't read any RTL languages, examples of missing functionality are very much welcome.

[Infocatcher]

You can create preference like built-in intl.uidirection.ar = rtl to test RTL with any locale.
E.g. intl.uidirection.en-US = rtl

Also see for -moz-padding-start/-moz-padding-end and -moz-margin-start/-moz-margin-end.

[tanriol]

Well, the problem is I don't know what should the result look like. Should I move sidebar to the right in an RTL locale? move buttons to the left? just mirror everything?
Or do they mean that an RTL feed item in an LTR locale should look not like it looks now? What should it look like?

[ilali]

unfortunately i doesn't have any knowledge about programing but i want to explain the problem more:
here is a captured picture in digest about RTL problem:

in this picture, you can see two kind of texts: 1- normal texts (not bold ones) that are showing correctly but only there is a small problem that is left align. in fact they should be right aligned. 2- Bold Texts, as you see they are combined with some english words (that are LTL) and in this case there are two problems: first one (small problem) is that they are left aligned and second one (big problem) is that the sentence order is corrupted: persian words after the english ones are shown before english word and persian words before english words are shown after them.
bacause you are not familiar with persian (RTL) language i will try to explain the problem using an english example:
assume this sentence:
"it is a cat"
you expect if you add a persian word such as *** in the middle of sentence it changes to:
"it is a *** cat"
but because some problems, when you add that persian word to the middle of sentence, its order corrupted and will change to:
"cat *** it is a"
it is the exact problem that i explaind and i hope you find what is happening in persian sentences when thay are contained with some english words.
i also use Feedly in firefox and it doesn't any problem with RTL languages such as persian, arabic, etc. here is feedly screen shot frome same sentences in pereviou post:

There is a 'language detect' API written by Google which is used in all Google products (Gmail,
Translate, and also Reader). It can force the directionality of a text box based on the detected language
of the content: http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#language_detect

[tanriol]

Thank you very much. I'll try to fix these mismatches.

[ilali]

are you working on this issue? have you been any progress?

[tanriol]

I've been away for some time, so no progress yet. I'm going to investigate it in a week.

[ilali]

if you are not sure to find a way to automatically detect RTL language characteristic (which will not slowdown the add-on), you could add an option to display all items of a feed in RTL mode.

[tanriol]

I'm currently a bit busy, so will look in some time.

[ilali]

i know you are bussy but i want to say that i contacted with Bamboo feed Addon developers and ask them to add RTL support to their product and now after about 2 weeks they add this to Bamboo:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bamboo-feed-reader/versions/
i think this task should not be so complicated.

[ilali]

Hi Tanriol; i asked bamboo feed reader developer to explain how he added RTL support to Bamboo and here is his respond:
This is an open source software, you can browse all source code from the Mozilla website.
In RSS feeds:
Lookup the "language" node of the feed and it is considered as RTL if it starts with ar, fa, ur, ps, syr, dv, he or yi.
To display text in right to left mode just use the "direction" CSS property with "rtl" value.