Better RTL Language Support

[bennypowers]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Posts and comments written in RTL languages on dev.to don't always look great. See https://dev.to/biros/where-are-dev-users-coming-from-4l53/comments

Describe the solution you'd like
RTL posts and comments should be identified as such and have attributes or styles applied as needed. See https://github.com/waiting-for-dev/string-direction

Describe alternatives you've considered
Keen to hear other ideas.

Additional context
See also #304

[hummusonrails]

Solutions might be found within HTML5 itself, without the need for any additional Gems or packages. The following article outlines some steps that can be implemented: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-dir. When the dir is set for RTL content, the punctuation marks are correctly placed at the end of a sentence and not moved to the front of a sentence, as an example.

[bennypowers]

@benhayehudi But how would we identify which content to apply dir to. Should we require authors who write in RTL languages to add some liquid or HTML tag to their markdown? Seems needlessly burdensome to me. I imagine we could run each tag in the rendered markdown through something like string-direction and conditionally apply a dir attribute should the need arise.

Would that significantly affect performance?
Could we reach a middle ground by adding a user setting like "scan my posts and comments for RTL languages"? What about discoverabililty - should we burden users even with a one-time config?

[N-Molham]

I just joined the community and would like to help if I can ... RTL support (Arabic) is pretty important

[hummusonrails]

@N-Molham - I agree. I think this is an important issue. I released an article in a RTL language, and the rendering was off because of it. I don't have a lot of spare time to code the solution, but glad to lend a hand in code review of it.

[KL13NT]

Hey people, is this issue going anywhere? I'd like to work on a PR for this but unsure whether I should even start. We could use a CLD-like library or simply ask the creator of an article to specify the direction of text. For instance, detecting/specfying the language and based on that add specific classes to the HTML that handle the directions and rendering of RTL text. This is quite needed right now.

[N-Molham]

I am not a python guy so I will try to help as much as I can

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On Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 6:47 AM Nabil Tharwat ***@***.***> wrote: Hey people, is this issue going anywhere? I'd like to work on a PR for this but unsure whether I should even start. We could use CLD <https://github.com/CLD2Owners/cld2> for instance to detect the language and based on that add specific classes to the HTML that handle the directions and rendering of RTL text. This is quite needed right now. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1239>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA4YNNEKRO3RSLYGUGWNGF3QPUX7RANCNFSM4GHVS6LQ> .

[cmgorton]

Hey folks we are starting work on i18n support on Forem. We are still in the initial infrastructure stages of this project. There is an open issue #14888 and a post by Ben Halpern that explains our plans a bit more: https://dev.to/devteam/forem-hacktoberfest-let-s-internationalize-404n

Because of this new work and the direction we are going with it, I am going to close this issue.

[yheuhtozr]

@cmgorton Unless you'd like to make #14888 an umbrella issue, I believe RTL support in web design is largely orthogonal to what that issue currently describes to do, and even workable alongside it. I wouldn't think closing this issue for the other makes sense in the i18n engineering context.

[citizen428]

@cmgorton I think I agree with @yheuhtozr on this, RTL-support in Forem will require a lot of work that goes beyond pure string translation.

[cmgorton]

OK! Thank you both for the input here. I am going to leave this closed for now while @JennieOcken and I work on the GitHub Discussions implementation. I think we could convert this issue to a discussion so we can continue talking about what would be needed. Then we could convert it back to an issue when we have a solid plan.