Support RTL conversations in the ubuntu theme

[Haggai Eran]

Binary package hint: adium-theme-ubuntu

Hi,

Currently, the ubuntu theme in empathy is hardcoded towards conversations with left-to-right directionality. Even if the messages are with right-to-left directionality, for example, in Hebrew or Arabic, the message is left aligned, and the bubble appears to the right of the avatar.

In my opinion, the best way to support these languages would be to somehow run pango_get_base_dir on each message, and expose this information to the theme. The theme could for example set a CSS class for messages that are right-to-left, and then format them correctly using the CSS.

An alternative solution, would be to detect the directionality according to the user's locale. This would be little less useful in my opinion, because one user might have a conversation in a left-to-right language, while using a locale which is right-to-left, or vice versa.

Regards,
Haggai Eran

[Abdulrahman M. S. (saanina)]

I edited the adium-theme-ubuntu to support RTL,
I test it on Arabic because its my native language .. and with MSN protocol !

here the branch/
https://code.launchpad.net/~saanina/adium-theme-ubuntu/i18n

And I attached an image to see how it look like

[Haggai Eran (haggai-eran)]

The image looks good to me. I like the fact that the entire paragraph changes direction, along with the date. However, I think that the original theme had the dates only in the beginning of the bubble, and not on every line.

Anyway, well done.

[Masoud Abkenar (mabkenar)]

Please also consider this image when working on this bug:

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/72569338/audium-themes.png

It can show that different themes have different problems. It sometimes depend on the nickname shown in the chat window.