Earlier this week I saw a request for help from the Israeli community to fix an RTL issue in the Ubuntu installation. Although the request is in Hebrew, the screenshots speak for themselves and show the cropped text on the right side of the screen.
There’s a combination of a few problems:
- Some of the text has LTR directionality, probably due to sentences beginning with an English word. This could be worked around by some translation changes or forcing directionality with RLM characters.
- The text is aligned to the left. This might be due to the sames reasons above. Maybe it’s also possible to override the alignment of RTL languages regardless of the directionality.
- The text is cropped on the left side. Seems that just mirroring the English positions isn’t enough to get good results. (I didn’t check the code to see if that’s actually what is done, but that’s one of the common ways I saw to handle support for RTL programs).
LP bug #798768 was reported a month ago, but it seems to repeat LP bug #560114 reported in April 2010. Any help with these issues will be more than welcome. Of course, I’ll be glad to help in any possible way (sorry, I don’t write code) and I’m sure this also applies to the members of the local community.
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