Right-To-Left languages are not supported

Hebrew, Arabic - are impossible to use...

i fitteled with Hebrew for a bit and got it semi working of course vista SP1(using a tablet ) doesn't allow for Hebrew so i guess my experiments are on hold

we are trying to remain compatible with the Windows supported features for unicode and RTL languages, but sometimes we screw up.

Additionally, all of the devs are English speakers, with a smattering of second languages (Russian, Spanish, and German... and I think Kevin took French in high school). However, these are all LTR languages and so we have no experience with languages that use a different reading order. This makes it difficult to test or notice when RTL is not performing correctly.

So, eburcat, can you be more specific? Which text fields or labels or content display areas are having problems? Or is it really just a application-wide problem? (I thought we were doing OK with it... but like I said, hard to tell).

Hello Mike,

Basically the problem is very simple, it appears in the message window. The text shown is backwards, for instance if i send the sentance "Hello there..." (in hebrew of course), the message windows displays "olleH ereht..." so this means every word is backward and all the words in the sentance are also backward.

I hope you solve this problem quickly. because I am a big fan now of Digsby, really nice work!

thanks,
Leor

Some additional details (tested on build 13706):

1. RTL text is left-aligned and rendered LTR in message windows. It should be right-aligned and, what's more important, RTL rendered.

2. Surprisingly, typing RTL text in the message window text box will render it RTL, but still left-aligned. Also, if LTR text is mixed in, the flow of text is broken in the wrong way.

3. When using the "right to left" context menu option, the text gets right-aligned, but it's rendered in some funky non-standard LTR way, making punctuation marks (directionally neutral characters) break the flow of the text.

I don't know what you guys use to render text, but if it correctly supports Unicode then these issues should be easily fixable with some Unicode control characters magic.

I'll be more than happy to provide further help, testing and/or specifications for this feature, since it's a major dealbreaker for Hebrew speaking users (and, I guess, Arabic ones).

Other than that, Digsby rocks the way few IM clients ever did. Keep up the amazingly good work!

Avish

nyte_falcon: I guess your fitting helped, because it seems that hebrew is much better now.
Still, there are some places where the word order is reversed. For example, here:

Another vote for proper RTL support. Digsby does rock, but it LTR's messages, which is a bother (as Eeyore would say).

I can edit the CSS for a give template to RTL it, but then _all_ messages would go RTL, and some of my contacts are English speaking (LTR). So... There's really some work to be done here.

I volunteer to help test as well. I'm no coder genius, but I can test.

Edit: I added this request to the wishlist (http://digsbies.org/site/view/rfe) as RTL Support in conversations and popups.

If you're interested, please go vote for the feature.

Last edited by ezuk (2008-04-28 06:08:27)

This has now been approved on the wishlist, go vote

http://digsbies.org/site/node/207

any news on this issue?
I don't think that This issue should be implemented based on the number of votes and the score...
Voting suggests that some people may not like this feature,
But the thing is, all people that use RTL languages NEED this to enjoy using Digsby
And all other people that chat in LTR languages, should't Care...
It won't disturb them in any way, they won't even notice it...

So to sum up, I don't really see why someone would vote less then 5 on this, besides for it to drop down below "their" favorite feature.

Last edited by Altryne (2008-06-04 07:35:02)

yea... this is more of a 'bug' not a feature request.

don't worry Altryne, bugs nearly always have priority over feature requests.

Any news on this? It's been quite a while... I wish I could use Digsby.

Digsby Blog wrote:

Added support for complex languages like Arabic and Thai
Fixed numerous bugs with right to left support in the input box

I never checked really how ICQ and MSN/LiveMessenger are working with RTL languages, but I'll throw some ideas;

Generally, both ICQ and MSN text input area responds to the default windows keys Left Ctrl+Shift (LTR) and Right Ctrl+Shirt (RTL), and the entire area (or at least the paragraph you're currently on) is changing the direction. It's nothing "magic" or special, it's a quite standard Unicode feature.

Now, I believe both ICQ and MSN are sending the message in something similar to HTML or some sort of similar XML code, and for example if it's the P tag, it gets

<p dir="rtl">...</p>

, so the recipient can read it exactly as it was sent - RTL aligned.

If Digsby is using only plain text, it can have some sort of auto-detection mechanism, similarly to what Pidgin for Linux has, and I believe that if the first character of the received/written message is either Hebrew or Arabic (0x05B0 - 0x06FE, incl.), it just sets the bidi alignment of the entire message to RTL, and I don't think it's hard to implement.

It won't solve the problem of the recipients reading it left-aligned but it's better than nothing.