RTL rendering

[Simon Richter]

If the system language is Arabic, the text direction and horizontal layout is right-to-left.

The layout is probably useful that way, but we should get input from users here.

The text rendering has small issues as parentheses are automatically adjusted for direction, as can be seen in the picture at http://s3.picofile.com/file/8191227500/Untitled3.png

[Simon Richter (sjr)]

Also on that system, possibly related:

1. default canvas is black
2. GAL canvas renders, but moving objects does not work

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

This might be relevant: http://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/14253

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

I think languages are more of a push model when it comes to open source. If someone (or some group of people) wants to implement one, then that's great. They might even broadcast their intentions on the mailing list to try and drum up some more support.

But I can't imagine anyone looking at a bug report and deciding "oh, I'm going to go and implement that language". As such, this bug report isn't really actionable.

[Simon Richter (sjr)]

The problem here is that wx already provides some RTL support by default, which breaks things (e.g. the canvas coordinate system is inverted, which is why the legacy canvas doesn't render), and these would be showstoppers for translations, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem.

Microsoft test their apps with a special "English-RTL" locale that contains the English strings reversed, and replicating that would be something that even someone not entirely familiar with the KiCad codebase could do.

It should look a bit weird, with texts right-justified, labels to the right of text fields and checkboxes on the right as well, but if it works and is generally usable, then this would mean translators could work on RTL languages.

That's why it's a KiCad bug, not a "someone should translate" request.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

I completely agree that it's a bug. However, the purpose of the bug database is not to accurately record all bugs in Kicad but rather to help developers maintain and enhance the application. To that end we need to keep the SNR high.

If someone does try to do a RTL language, they'll run into this quickly enough and can then re-open this bug.