Bug 181311

Summary:	right-to-left (RTL) direction not supported
Product:	[Unmaintained] kmail	Reporter:	Jess Boddy <jessbody>
Component:	general	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	bjoern, ebrahim, elcuco, jessbody, montel
Priority:	NOR	Keywords:	rtl
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Slackware
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jess Boddy 2009-01-19 16:24:40 UTC

Version:            (using KDE 3.5.9)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Slackware Packages

For RTL languages (e.g., Urdu, Arabic) it is important to be able to specify the direction of the text as "right-to-left" in HTML. Note that this is not the same as right-aligning. In Thunderbird, you are able to insert HTML tags, such as

<p dir="rtl">
-- here is text ---
</p>

which does the trick. In fact you only need insert the opening "paragraph" tag, the rest is taken care of by thunderbird. No such facility exists in KMail since you cannot insert any HTML tags. The only recourse seems to use the 'Unicode control characters' such as RLE.

Comment 1 Diego Iastrubni 2009-09-04 23:16:37 UTC

KMail should have an option to add arbitrary HTML tags.

Comment 2 Jess Boddy 2009-09-06 03:58:11 UTC

For RTL languages' support, arbitrary HTML tag support is not needed, just a subset. Thunderbird also supports only a subset. GMail has an button for switching text direction in order to support RTL (need to enable in settings).

Comment 3 Ebrahim Mohammadi 2010-05-27 17:09:09 UTC

This bug is still present in KMail 1.13.2 on KDE 4.4.2. Is anybody currently working on it?

Comment 4 Ebrahim Mohammadi 2010-05-30 17:53:43 UTC

As of revision 1132366, if you make some part of text RTL by pressing RightCtrl+Shift, the mail will be sent as HTML containing correct direction info, e.g. <p dir="rtl" ...

Next step would be adding two buttons to the toolbar. And after that, we should change the composer to behave like it does currently if HTML mail is explicitly selected by user, but otherwise it should send the mail as a plain text one which includes correct directions using Unicode characters such as RLE.

Comment 5 Ebrahim Mohammadi 2010-06-03 17:17:57 UTC

Related Qt bug report: http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-11095

Comment 6 Ebrahim Mohammadi 2010-07-30 17:46:24 UTC

As of revision 1157269, KMail has got a new toolbar "Direction Toolbar" which lets you change direction of parts of your email text. It is hidden by default, so don't forget to enable it manually.

Comment 7 Laurent Montel 2010-09-02 17:52:37 UTC

As comment #6 we have a "Direction toolbar" so we can close it.

Comment 8 Ebrahim Mohammadi 2010-09-02 19:21:28 UTC

There is still no support for plain text right-to-left email. But that's not a vital feature (at least to me) since HTML mail does the job. On the other hand it seems there is much to do under the hoods before we can implement plain text RTL mail. So I agree we close this issue. If somebody needs plain text RTL mail, he can always open another bug for that.