Ruby BiDi

Ruby gem to help working with bidirectional (left-to-right and right-to-left) text.

Install

gem install bidi

Use

Require the bidi module and use to_visual:

require "bidi"

bidi = Bidi.new
bidi_string = bidi.to_visual "משפט עם עברית ו-English. מספרים: 12345 (וגם כל מיני סימני פיסוק) וגם סימן קריאה!"

When rendering right-to-left text, some writers require reversing the string before passing it to them. Prawn is one such example. The render_visual function does this for you:

require "prawn"
require "bidi"

Prawn::Document.generate("hello.pdf") do
  self.text_direction = :rtl

  bidi = Bidi.new
  text bidi.render_visual "משפט עם עברית ו-English. מספרים: 12345 (וגם כל מיני סימני פיסוק) וגם סימן קריאה!"
end

Note: Hebrew (or any language, really) characters must be present in the font used by Prawn for them to appear. If you don't see the characters you expect, try explicitly setting the font inside the Prawn block. For example, if you have the Unicode Arial font in Arial.ttf, you should add:

font_families.update("Arial" => {
  :normal => "Arial.ttf",
});
font("Arial")

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Amit Yaron <amit@phpandmore.net>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.