Right-to-Left text issues

[bmaisonny]

Hi,

I've read a few posts on these forums about RTL scripts issues (Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana...) and it seems RTL support is slowly but surely improving in Oxygen XML, except in Author.

My problem is with understanding the use of the "Change text orientation" feature. If I open an XHTML file in Arabic and set text orientation to be RTL, XHTML tags become garbage if they contain Arabic text. For example:
<th colspan="3">ض</th>
becomes:
<th/>ض<"th colspan="3>

This is unusable. I understand why text would be displayed like this by a Unicode-compliant text editor, but OxygenXML should know better about the syntax of elements and attributes.

Or did you design this feature for when element names themselves are in Arabic?


Another issue I have with RTL support is that text direction should, IMO, be automatically detected. For instance (still in XHTML):

<p dir="rtl">Let's assume there is real Arabic text here</p>

I'd expect that text direction would be RTL by default inside that element. This is not the case: Oxygen XML shows LTR text direction by default (thank you for your very useful caret with an arrow, BTW) and changes direction only inside RTL runs of text. So, the only way to change text direction is with the global feature I mention above. For bidirectional text support, I think it is important that users can define the context direction on any element, so that weak characters are correctly placed.

It is possible that OxygenXML is usable when a document contains text in a single direction, but for bidirectional documents, it is seriously difficult to use.

Finally, are you able to announce any release date/period for bidirectional text support in Author?

Thank you,
Benoit

[adrian]

Hello,

Thank you for the feedback.

What version of Oxygen are you currently using?

For the Text mode Oxygen inherits the RTL support that Java offers. Unfortunately, when changing orientation the tags get mangled the way you described. We are aware of this problem and we are working on a solution. I have added your comments to our issue tracking tool.


Note that Oxygen does not yet take into account the document type specific orientation attributes(like dir="rtl"). I have also logged this as an improvement request. I'm not sure if this will be possible to be implemented in Text mode, but it will definitely be implemented in Author mode when the support becomes available.


Currently we do not have a fixed deadline for the implementation of the bidirectional text support in Author. It is currently scheduled to be implemented in the long term. Depending on the interest in this feature it could be moved forward or backward in our schedule.

Regards,
Adrian

[bmaisonny]

Sorry, I forgot to respond:

What version of Oxygen are you currently using?

Now I'm using version 14 and the status hasn't changed:

• Text mode: usable for bidi text, but the function that changes text orientation isn't useful, in my opinion.
• Grid mode: usable for bidi text, but appropriate for data-centric documents mostly, not really for text documents.
• Author mode: text selection and caret location are not usable on RTL text.

[Radu]

Hi,

Just to update this thread, Oxygen 15.1 added bidirectional text support when editing in the visual Author mode, support which also looks at the direction @dir attributes.

Regards,
Radu