Bug on display of RTL Fonts

[tzveeka]

Hello,

While tryping in webuilder in hebrew fonts, webuilder supports the display of the fonts great, on some occasions, on other - the words are displayed in reverse order.
this was checked on version 9.5.0.104.

The issue:

Whenever hebrew text is inserted in plain editor without any tags or comments integrating it, it's displayed from left to right word by word.
this means that if my sentence is "hello world nice to meet you" - what gets displayed is: "you meet to nice world hello".

However, and the solution is already here, whenever the same text is inserted in a comment or a php echo - it displays correct.

This can be seen in this image:


While some of the hebrew is displayed correctly on comments and in php echos, as shown above -
double clicking or selecting a word actually sellects the first word as if the sentence was not rendered in reverse

This can be seen in this image:


It seems like there's already a method there for displaying hebrew and RTL text correctly, what is missing is this affect on the whole text and not only in text which is commented or echoed, and a solution to the select effects, which actally selects in reverse even though the text is displayed correctly.

Fixing these will make webuilder a great RTL text editor,
can this issue be solved please?

[Karlis]

It is very difficult because we do not understand any of the RTL languages, so it is imposisble to do any tests. If you could provide step by step instructions on how to reproduce the problem (and easily copyable piece of sample text), it might help.

[tzveeka]

Great,

I have included the UTF-8 Without BOM docuement used to make the screenshots for this thread.
Just open the file with webuilder, if you can't see the charecters correctly, you might missing the hebrew fonts.
Just use currier new and you'll get the same charecters shown in the screenshots.

if you still have problems with the fonts - you can easily get hebrew and remove it later by following these steps for XP:
http://www.petri.co.il/install_hebrew_on_windows_xp.htm
or these for vista:
http://www.petri.co.il/install_hebrew_o ... _vista.htm
(in both articles look for option 2 - On a running installation of windows)

The solution is to get the text in PART 1 of the document to look like and text in PART 2, and make both PARTS of text to be truly selectable and not select in reverse (this is explained in screenshot 3, of the post which started this thread)

This document can also be opened with notepad which correctly handles the display of RTL and the select of RTL text, and you'll be able to see the correct RTL alignment of text in all the PARTS

Here's the sample php file: (it's in a zip archive so it won't get executed by the server)
http://www.elrans.com/rtl_text_bug.zip

If you encounter any trouble in opening the file with notepad - Here's a screen shots of the document opened with all RTL text correctly aligned:


Here's a screen shots of the document opened with webuilder, while PART1 RTL text is incorrectly aligned, part 2 is:


You can create new RTL text yourself without knowing the language or having the keyboard, just Copy-Paste the text from the opened docuement letter / word by letter / word and you'll notice the ordering problem.
Hope this gets us a to a solution - solving this will make the editor 100% RTL enabled!

[tzveeka]

Hello,

Any news regarding this issue ?

[Karlis]

At the present moment we will not be able to help. While you can open and save RTL files, there are some issues with visual display of RTL languages that we can not overcome at the present moment.

[tzveeka]

Hi,

Thanks for the update, even if it's a negative - good to know.

If it's Ok, i'll surface this thread a year from now just to check if the time is right then

[davenz]

I feel for both parties in this issue.

Customers like tzveeka probably have a hard job finding any software with decent RTL support, especially if developed by non-RTL language speaking coders. Karlis, Gatis and perhaps other developers at Blumentals slave away in what is most likely a labour of love to bring us what is actually excellent software, however, given that English is (I think) not their first language, trying to implement something as complex as Hebrew would be a real nightmare, especially if using bespoke controls and other code. It would be a different story if they had someone on the team who could speak the language, but as far as I know they haven't, which is why support for RTL languages will likely never be implemented. Translation of the GUI and help files is one thing; providing fully-fledged editing functionality is another, especially in a busy workspace such as the editor window, which is why I completely understand the developer's inability to resolve the issue.

That said though, it would make sound business sense for Blumentals to find a coder who can speak these languages to work on implementing this feature, especially now that RTL languages have their own dedicated domain names. I imagine there are potentially thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of RTL language-speaking people looking for a decent editor to make websites with.

Dave
davethompson.co.nz