Tuesday, October 11, 2011

#RTL support in #Wikimedia #Commons

The screenshot below shows splendidly how #MediaWiki has improved its support for languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The sidebar is to the right, the labels used for the image are in Arabic and the descriptions are in the direction of the language indicated.

As you can see, the "Summary" is a text in English and it is displayed in the wrong direction for English. This is probably the consequence of the software not knowing that this text is in English.


This is clearly a bug and it needs to be reported. The obvious way is to report this in Bugzilla. A bug reported in Bugzilla ensures that there is a record of this issue. It is likely that more issues like this bug exist where support for the use of RTL languages breaks.

In the Localisation team we are exploring the known RTL bugs. This is the best time to experiment with the combination or RTL languages and LTR languages because at this time we are extremely receptive and are able to resolve them relatively quickly.
Thanks,
       GerardM

4 comments:

Robin Pepermans said...

This is Commons-specific. I have suggested to add a div dir="ltr" on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Information

GerardM said...

A summary can be written in any language. Consequently adding a div dir="ltr" is wrong by design.

As this is an issue with tables, it probably means that indicating the language is necessary for each cell because this can also trigger other behaviour like WebFonts and Narayam.
Thanks,
GerardM

GerardM said...

Amir did fix this specific issue on Commons. This is a temporary fix as I understand it; he indicates that it is nice to have a proper fix. Something that should be easy but may get tricky.
Thanks,
GerardM

Robin Pepermans said...

Fixing it there is good but leaves out other files where custom text is given, which is most likely in English or another LTR language.

However you do it, there will never be the "right fix".