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Default Forum Theme
At the bottom of each page of the forums, there is a drop down box that says “Developer”. This is our forum’s default theme. By default, it’s formatted left to right.
What’s wrong with this? Nothing. You can type in both Persian and English. If you’re mostly typing English you might not notice a problem. Sentences start on the left and move out to the right. This is normal for English.
But if you write a Persian sentence, it will push off from the left, instead of starting at the right. And the last piece of puntuation doesn’t follow the last word, it jumps to the right side of the sentence. This might still not be much of a problem.
The problems occur when you start mixing the two languages. If you start the sentence in English and throw in a few Persian words مثل اين it looks OK. But if you type a Persian sentence and throw in English words, it breaks up the order of the sentence, like so (we copied the same sentence twice, in the second one, we pasted in English text over the dashed lines):
جمله بدون كلمه انگليسي ---- اين شكلى در ميايد.
جمله با كلمه انگليس english words اين شكلى در ميايد.
Why does this happen? The computer just sees a string of text and has a rule of direction. So, in the first line, it’s all one string of text. Call it Astring. But in the second line, you have a string of text Astring, followed by English text, now that’s Bstring, followed by more Persian, that’s Cstring. Going left to right, the computer puts it down, A,B,C. You want it to put down C,B,A, but that’s backward to the computer. While it will happily show the string itself going in the correct direction, it sequences the strings left to right.
Switching to Right to Left
These left to right features will not bother our English dominant writers, but if you want to work mostly in Persian and interject a few words of English it gets frustrating. We haven’t figured out a way to have bi-lingual post entry but there is a way to simply switch the whole forum to the other direction. We developed a new theme ("Developer-pe-rtl") which is set to be right to left. All you have to do is go to the bottom of the page and open the drop down menu and switch it from Developer to Developer-pe-rtl. It will then switch the entire forum to right to left format.
All the data in the posts remains the same. You are simply interfacing with the forum from a different direction.
This means, of course, that if you’re in Developer-pe-rtl mode, the problems the Persian dominant writers were having with their punctuation and with putting in English words will now affect English writing. Also, what was written in one mode, when looked at in the other mode will appear differently. But don’t worry, the data’s all there, you’re just seeing it in a different way. You can switch back and forth and see it both ways.
Note that while typing in the text, it may appear to be going the wrong way, but when you preview and post it, it should be fine. I don’t know if this is a function of my own Mac set up or if everyone has this experience.
Going Fully Bi-lingual
Unfortunately, we have yet to figure out how to make it possible to have one forum, and allow people to switch direction modes within a post. It’s not hard to do in a post on the blog, like right here. I just put it in an html p or div tag with the “pe” class and hey presto, the sentence starts over to the right:
جمله در “div” تگ با كلمه انگليسي English words اين شكلى در ميايد
For some reason, I can’t do this in the forums. Also can’t seem to do it in the comments section. We’re working on a solution. Please stand by.
More About Computers and Right-To-Left ("rtl")
If you have any links that explain the technicalities of right to left for computers, please let us know and we’ll add them to our sidebar.
