[development] Proposal to make drupal support RTL languages out of the box

[Khalid B]

Munzir

Whatever the outcome from this discussion, please add your suggestion
to this discussion which is a repository of RTL issues with  Drupal

http://drupal.org/node/3696

Thanks

On 3/11/06, Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> No doubt drupal is a great piece of work and the people behind it have done a
> great job and we are all thankful to them. However, being the first time to
> deal with it, I faced many problems regarding Arabic support. I, and another
> friend, Mugtaba, decided to lend a hand as a reward. We began with the
> translation of 4.7beta branch and almost finished it. Then we turned to the
> problem of RTL/BiDi and found the work of Ayman who has thankfully made his
> own bidi-theme. We thought about it carefully and found that Drupal has the
> flexibility to support RTL for all the themes out of the box with a trivial
> modifications to drupal files. So, instead of having themes for RTL which is
> different than the themes for LTR, we would patch all the themes to support
> both RTL and LTR.
>
> The problem:
> In RTL languages the direction should be set to be from right to left and
> hence everything on the page should be mirrored horizontally. Graphical
> arrows that point to the right, should now point to the left. Things that
> float right, should now float left. padding-left values, should go to
> padding-right values and vice versa. Other rules which are not direction
> oriented would remain the same.
>
> The solution is to have a drupal_RTL.css file. I will shortly show an example
> of that file. This file should be loaded from common.inc in addition to
> drupal.css in case of RTL languages to override a few rules of the defaults.
>
> This way drupal would support RTL language and mambo and zope/plone won't have
> an advantage on this issue ;).
>
> // $Id: drupal_RTL.css, v 0.01 $
> /* Override styles from drupal.css */
>
> /*
> ** HTML elements
> */
> table {
>   direction: rtl;
> }
> th {
>   text-align: right;
>   padding-right: 0em;
>   padding-left: 1em;
> }
>
> /*
> ** Menu styles
> */
> ul.menu {
>   text-align:right;
> }
> ul.menu li {
>   margin: 0 0.5em 0 0;
> }
>
> //This rule uses a copy of the original image flipped horizontally.
> li.collapsed {
>   list-style-image: url('images/menu-collapsed-rtl.png');
> }
>
> I will attach a complete file.
>
> For now, temporary I put the logic into my own template.php like this
>
> <?php
> // $Id: template.php, v 0.01 $
> /**
>  * Catch and override the theme_stylesheet_import function from theme.inc
>  */
>
> function phptemplate_stylesheet_import($path, $media = 'all') {
>   $rtl = array("ar", "fa", "he", "ur", "yi");
>   if (in_array(locale_initialize(), $rtl)) {
>     if (file_exists(path_to_theme() . '/drupal_RTL.css')) {
>       theme_add_style(path_to_theme() . '/drupal_RTL.css', $media);
>     }
>     if (file_exists(path_to_theme() . '/RTL.css')) {
>       theme_add_style(path_to_theme() . '/RTL.css', $media);
>     }
>   }
>   return theme_stylesheet_import($path, $media);
> }
> ?>
>
> Which would work but would require an unnecessary step of duplicating this
> same file in all the themes directories.
>
> When we make this clear in the documentation, the developers of the themes
> could make their design in a more or less symmetric way that doesn't even
> require a separate RTL.css file but when the need arises, the theme author or
> any one interested could very easily make that file available and official
> part of the theme. As an example, I quickly tested the theme fancy and here
> is a minimal file that works.
>
> // $Id: RTL.css, v 0.01 $
> /* Override styles from style.css */
> #logo img {
>   float: right;
> }
> #menu {
>   text-align: left;
> }
> #primary-tabs {
>   float: left;
> }
> .bleft {
>   width: 10px;
> }
> .bleft-img {
>   background: #ce5003 url(images/cr.png) no-repeat top right;
> }
> .bright-img {
>   background: #ce5003 url(images/cl.png) no-repeat top right;
> }
>
> Hope this would help solve the problem in a neat way.
>
> --
> Munzir Taha
> Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
> Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-trans-ar
> Maintainer of the OpenBugs project page at
> http://www.arabic-fedora.org/munzir/OpenBugs.html
> Master CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS, Linux+, LPI 101
> Riyadh, SA
>