Bug 99200

Summary:	kbabel should provide choice whether to display msgstr RTL or LTR
Product:	[Unmaintained] kbabel	Reporter:	A Al-Arfaj <aalarfaj>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Stanislav Visnovsky <visnovsky>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	chahibi, elcuco
Priority:	NOR	Keywords:	rtl
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description A Al-Arfaj 2005-02-12 16:51:28 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.3KDE 1.2)
Installed from:    00

Currently, kbabel determines if the first character in a msgstr is from an LTR or RTL language, and as such aligns the entire msgstr text based on what that language is. If the first character is a Latin character, everything will be left-aligned. If its an Arabic or Hebrew character everything will be right-aligned, regardless of whether or not text from another language is present.

This should not be so. If I have to start a sentence with an English word, such as any acronym, the entire msgstr will be left-aligned, even if its an Arabic sentence. It does not affect the file, but its ugly, and very confusing.

Elsewhere, most text editors give you three buttons: left-align, right-align and center. These are merely display settings, like font face and size, and do not affect the text itself.

Obviously kbabel does not need a center option, but I should be able to force text to start from the right of the box, even if the first word is English. A simple toggle button to enable this would help...

Comment 1 Stanislav Visnovsky 2005-02-14 07:38:32 UTC

Basically, you mix up two things: formatting and presentation. The buttons in
text editors are about formatting of a text, while you complain about the
presentation. Further, the presentation is a problem in Qt.

The only reasonable approach to me is to setup the direction according to the
currently configured language of a project.

Comment 2 Diego Iastrubni 2005-12-17 12:56:20 UTC

Hi A Al-Arfaj,

If you open qtconfig, under the Interface tab, you will see a checkbox called "Enhanced support for language written  right-to-left", check it and restart kde.

Now on every QLineEdit and QTextEdit you will be able to choose the direction of the text by pressing ctrl+shift (like in windows). 

You are asking to determinate the direction of the text according to the msgstr, and not the "plain text" on the widget. I am not sure it's possible on Qt3, but on Qt4 it might be possible. However, on Qt4 there is no automatic direction detection, which means the direction of the text box is set to the direction of the widget (and not the content).

Just some random toughts for KDE4.... 

BTW, what I do when I translate something in kbabel, is pressing enter after each HTML tag, and so my text gets alligned to the right, and the HTML tags on the left, this makes the translation easier for work with. Not perfect, but sill quite good.

Comment 3 Diego Iastrubni 2007-12-14 11:35:50 UTC

*** Bug 129684 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Diego Iastrubni 2009-09-04 23:48:22 UTC

KBabel is discontinued. New bugs should be reported against Lokalize.

IMHO it's safe to close as "UNMAINTAINED".