Right-To-Left (RTL) languages and Wine

[James Mckenzie]

Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:
>Sent: Sep 29, 2010 11:25 AM
>To: Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
>Cc: Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine at gmail.com>, "'wine-devel at winehq.org'" <wine-devel at winehq.org>
>Subject: Re: Right-To-Left (RTL) languages and Wine
>
>Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz> writes:
>
>> Did I mention that the automatic mirroring is a broken idea
>> implemented in a broken way already?
>
>What do you consider broken about it?
>
>> Aside from notepad, for which the difference is very small, and most
>> people would regard a default LTR control as the correct behavior
>> anyway, what other applications are you concerned over?
>
>Pretty much all of them. For example, Wordpad has combo boxes in the
>toolbars, those won't be RTL without changing the process layout.
>Winefile and Regedit have treeviews that would need mirroring, etc.
>
And Microsoft Office appears different in RTL rather than LTR.  I used to work with someone that had the Arabic version of these programs and it would switch from RTL when typing in Arabic to LTR when typing in a Latin-based language.

As AJ has stated, there is more to do than just 'mirroring' to get RTL into Wine.  I remember this was quite difficult to get into OpenOffice.org as well when I was testing it (I think I still have Hebrew and Arabic test files for Writer in OpenDocument (.odt) format.)

James McKenzie