[Mailman-i18n] RTL and BiDi

Martin v. Löwis loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de
08 Oct 2002 11:53:22 +0200


Arash Zeini <a.zeini@farsikde.org> writes:

> But the problem may occur as soon as we talk about the archives,
> where HTML is generated. My guess is everything will be
> left-to-right and unreadable.

Did you try? My guess is that it comes out correctly, since the Web
browser will do RTL.

> This is why I posted. While managing a mailing list I tried to enter
> some description text in Farsi. Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew are written
> right-to-left and all descriptions that I entered occurred just LTR.

When entering them, or when Mailman was displaying them back?

> Also the generated HTML in mailman does not use UTF-8 encoding why
> again we have a problem.

What Mailman version? I don't think UTF-8 is strictly necessary -
wouldn't ISO-8859-6 work as well?

> I.e.  no browser would display any of these three languages
> correctly. One has to set it manually to be able to read the text.

Did you configure Mailman to change the encoding of the pages?

> You are right, this is another story. But even here we need the
> proper structure in the HTML pages to be able to translate
> anything. We need everything mirrored otherwise it is not useable.
> This is done through the dir="RTL" attribute in HTML.

I think this can go into the page templates.

> in the main .pot file there is one string which is not a
> translatable string but the entry which denotes the text
> direction. I.e. the translator fills in the value RTL or LTR and
> according to this value the interface and text direction is set. The
> same could be done in mailman I guess.

I think it can be solved in a much simpler way.

Regards,
Martin