Comment 15 for bug 734023

Hello,

I have the same problem, still in ubuntu 12.04; this issue and other issues related to other software happen when the locale values are set and the interface is switched partially instead fully to be RTL depending on the language; im not sure what library(ies) try to do this; but i have a similar issue but less grave in lmms too.

Anyhow, to replicate this issue you will need to either switch the language of the system (so language-support in gnome3 or similar) and try to start audacity with that changed; i guess you can also do :

LANG="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="ar:en"
LC_NUMERIC="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ar_EG.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="ar_EG.UTF-8"

and runaudacity afterwards.

as mentioned earlier; the workaround is to change "some" of theses settings; in my case the cleaninst approach i though of was to create /usr/local/bin/audacity and have the following as content:

#!/bin/bash
LANGUAGE="en"
/usr/bin/audacity

this makes audacity read the language by default from system (I guess LANG variable) so if things are setup to use arabic or hebrew or farisi (i guess this bug will appear in all RTL languages); but it will put everything in LTR which is usable (arguably more usable for someone who is already used to the english interface for example but wants strings to be translated only)

I would suggest to raise the importance of this issue because the software is not usable if the system is setup in arabic; and the work around is very easy i guess; just have a shell script with path with precedence over /usr/bin that would check if the LANGUAGE variable is set to any rtl language; it would set it to en or whatever value fits there C maybe or take value from another variable or anything until this bug is fixed. again, this bug renders audacity unusable for anyone using arabic, hebrew as system language.