Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 10:28 pm Post subject: Question for Arabic and Hebrew users
If you set your preferred language to Arabic or Hebrew in the System Preferences application, Neo/J flips everything (menus, buttons, etc.) so that they are positioned right-to-left.
I know that these languages are written right-to-left, but I noticed that no other Mac OS X applications do this and it looks a bit odd within the Mac OS X desktop. So, I was planning on disabling this feature.
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 1:19 am Post subject: Re: Question for Arabic and Hebrew users
pluby wrote:
If you set your preferred language to Arabic or Hebrew in the System Preferences application, Neo/J flips everything (menus, buttons, etc.) so that they are positioned right-to-left.
I know that these languages are written right-to-left, but I noticed that no other Mac OS X applications do this and it looks a bit odd within the Mac OS X desktop. So, I was planning on disabling this feature.
Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Patrick
Sorry since I don't read/write Arabic/Hebrew I can't give an informed opinion. But I wondered what version of Mac OS X you were testing this in; whether you logged out and back or just changed the primary language on the fly, and only new applications launched used Arabic/Hebrew; whether Finder reversed the menus or not?
The reason I asked is that with Mac OS X 10.3.x Panther, I noticed Finder (at least) does display Hebrew filenames right to left (whereas it didn't for Mac OS X 10.2.x).
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 1:27 am Post subject: Re: Question for Arabic and Hebrew users
More thoughts...
I don't know if you have any Mac OS X specific preferences handling in Neo/J, but perhaps make the feature an option configurable by the user (and default to what the majority of people here think the behavior should be). I assume that OOo on other platforms also reverse the menus, and I would think there are probably some users of Neo/J, that would like to be compatible with use of OOo on other platforms (educational users?)
I'm thinking you don't need to add any UI for the preferences, but the user could do something like :
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 3:15 am Post subject: Re: Question for Arabic and Hebrew users
pluby wrote:
If you set your preferred language to Arabic or Hebrew in the System Preferences application, Neo/J flips everything (menus, buttons, etc.) so that they are positioned right-to-left.
Wow, that does look freaky!
If the interface text were localized, that might be one thing, but since it's just the "document" that supports RTL, surrounded by ("English") interface text, to me keeping the menus, buttons, etc., RTL is not desireable.
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 4:37 am Post subject: Great Work
Congrats and thanks Patrick for a great work and support for Arabic. Still testing so no comments yet but I did post to our website and hope we get some feedback from our users.
Now about the menus and buttons becoming RTL when the preferred language is Arabic is perfect if the menus were translated to Arabic
So I personally think that it should stay as it is and someone doesn't like it they could move English to the top of the list of preferred languages
I'll post any feedback in the test forum just wanted to response to this post. _________________ Turki M. Al-Ballaa
Editor in Chief Mac4Arabs.com
http://www.mac4arabs.com
Joined: Jul 01, 2004 Posts: 45 Location: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2004 4:49 am Post subject: RTL menus
As an occasional RLT user (Farsi) who is a native English speaker, I would prefer to see the buttons in the usual place, to match the interface. If I was a native Farsi speaker with the rest of the interface RTL I would want NeoOffice/J to fit in with that.
Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:42 am Post subject: RTL
I am a native Hebrew speaker. In general Mac apps do not reverse the interface for Hebrew and Arabic, while Windows apps do.
Personally, I don't like the look of windows with the interface reversed, so I set Windows machines to English as the preferred language, but I know that others prefer the Hebrew look.
Still, if there was good localization for Hebrew (and no version of OO has that) it would make sense to have everything in Hebrew. As long as it's just right-justifying English text, I think this should be disabled.
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