[Bf-committers] How & When could we support right-to-left languages?

[Knapp]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some pointers for people who like to dive into it:
>
> Issue 1: typing text in buttons
>
> source/blender/editors/interface/interface_handlers.c
> functions called ui_textedit_...
>
> It's all hardcoded to typing L->R now. Selecting, arrow keys same.
>
> Issue 2:
> Are numbers typed reverse too? I guess, but they don't draw reverse
> right?
>
> Issue 3:
> Filepaths... is this reversed?
>
> Issue 4:
> Text drawing in buttons, there's alignment code hardcoded... needs to
> be flippable.
> Same for truncating rules of strings in Blender.
>
> Issue 5:
> Click in text button has very nasty code to detect which character is
> found.
>
> Issue 6:
> Is increment/decrement button clicks the same still? Same for gesture
> (left = lower, right is higher value).
>
> All in all, it'll needs someone with quite some time figuring out our
> UI code. It's unfortunately wrapped old sorta 90ies stuff here still.
> Might be only possible by cleaning and structuring code partially.
>
> -Ton-

This reminds me of a bug I reported 2 years ago and it has persisted.
I think that if eyes are open to it, it might be fixable at the same
time as all the rest of this text stuff is fixed. The error is that
Blender ignores the keyboard switcher in KDE and only uses the keys
from the CLI. In my system this means that is uses Dvorak keys all the
time (not in the text editor though!) and not the standard quertz
keyboard that is set in KDE.

I also have what might be a completely stupid suggestion but I thought
I would throw it out just in case. Why not print all text to a text
box, a graphics area, that is flipped onto the screen and then just
flip this when you need to do right to left languages. It would save
all the trouble of having to redo everything backwards (relative to
English) for some languages. You might then just need mirror imaged
fonts for these other languages.

Great luck with all this!

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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