Right-to-left (RTL) is not a great default for Hebrew

[amire80]

Hello,

I am using Etherpad 1.2.11 at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org . The Accept-Language in my Firefox is Hebrew. Because of this I get Etherpad with the Hebrew interface by default, which is great,* but I also get the whole pad with the RTL direction, which is not great. I can change it in my preferences, but I have to do it every time I enter the pad, so it's quite uncomfortable.

The direction of the content is not supposed to be set according to the user interface language. Because every editor of the same pad can have a different UI language, but the content's language should be common to all the editors.

It makes the most sense to me to set the direction manually per paragraph using a toolbar button; in common word processors such buttons look more or less like this: [◀¶] for RTL and [¶▶] for LTR. If the pad is created by a user whose UI language is RTL (Hebrew, Arabic etc.), then the initial default can be RTL and otherwise it should be LTR.

It is also possible to do some kind of automatic direction detection, for example by counting the number of strong-rtl characters in every paragraph, but that looks like overkill to me at this point.

Thank you!

• I happen to be the translator :)

[JohnMcLear]

TLDR; Set Pad Direction as a Pad Setting value adopted from whoever created the pad.

If user overrides direction that overrides the pad setting. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature request, it's kinda low hanging anyways..

[amire80]

Thanks for the TLDR :)

Setting pad direction as a pad setting: that's the most immediate important thing to do, because setting the direction according to each user's language is definitely a bug.

Setting the direction per paragraph: consider it a feature request.

[marcelklehr]

Good point. I see some problems with making LTR/RTL a text attribute. A
per-Pad setting might also be useful, but I think the sanest approach
really would be to look at the chars (however, that's probably very
inefficient).

[JohnMcLear]

This kinda ties in nicely into pad global settings too which has still not been properly implemented

[amire80]

@marcelklehr Looking at the chars is a possibility. That's what GMail, Twitter and Facebook try to do, with varying degrees of success. Notably, Google Docs and desktop word processors don't do automatic text direction detection (Microsoft Word does it a bit, and it has some issues). It's definitely not a high priority. Adding toolbar buttons that change the paragraph direction is just enough.

[JohnMcLear]

That would be relatively easy to do with a plugin (see one that exists called ep_align that does alignment, just modifying that to do RTL css property would take seconds)

[amire80]

It's OK to do it, but if it's done, it should be optional. Maybe it's OK to make it on by default, but there needs to be a way to disable it. Desktop Linux text editors, like Kate and gEdit, do automatic detection, and this often makes editing very hard (I deal with code that involves RTL chars all the time). And again, it's not the most important thing.

[JohnMcLear]

@amire80 Get a patch in ;)

[JohnMcLear]

This should be in now, let me know if not :)