Window title misaligned in RTL languages

[Haggai Eran]

light-themes 0.1.5.9
light-themes 0.1.8.23, Ubuntu 11.10 beta 1

1. Set up a user account that uses a right-to-left language, such as Arabic.
2. Log in to that account.
3. Open any window.

What you see: The title is on the left.
What you should see: The title is on the right. (At least, as long as it is on the left in LTR languages.)

(This bug report previously also covered poor appearance of the well for the title bar buttons, which is now fixed.)

[Haggai Eran (haggai-eran)]

Sorry, the above attached was without the title bar...

[Haggai Eran (haggai-eran)]

The button well thing is mostly fixed in the latest version in the branch (0.1.5.9). There is a small bug with unfocused windows. The background of the left button on the right side is chosen to be "trough_right", instead of "trough_left".

Here's a patch that solves this.

There is also an issue with windows that have only a single close button, like the Run dialog, but its not only with RTL locales, so I guess it doesn't belong here.

[Haggai Eran (haggai-eran)]

Hi,

I think the second issue in this bug, about the button well in RTL languages, was fixed in latest updates (and discussed in Bug #532224).

The first issue is also discussed in Bug #538372. The title is currently aligned to the left, even in RTL locales where you would expect it to be right-aligned. I'm not sure that this is a duplicate though, because Bug #538372 initially requested that the alignment would be centered, since having a fixed right or left alignment doesn't work well in a multilingual environment. In any case, I've posted a patch to metacity's bugzilla and linked it to that bug report.

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

Is this fixed in maverick?

[Yaron (sh-yaron)]

As the following image shows its probably fixed:
http://www.calcalist.co.il/PicServer2/20122005/124359/Ubuntu_10.04_-_Language_Support.png

[Shahar Or (mightyiam)]

Persists in precise.

Don't get confused: maximised windows in Unity and Unity 2D have their titles rendered by Unity/2D itself. So in Unity, which is not mirrored yet (Bug #654988), the title is also on the left (should be on the right) and in Unity 2D, which is mirrored correctly, the title is on the right as it should be. So, for the sake of this bug, please look at the titles of windows when they are NOT maximized.

Thanks and Blessings,
Shahar

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

I don't think there's a way in metacity to theme differently accordingly to the RTL positioning

[Yaron (sh-yaron)]

In this case this is a bug in metacity....

[Haggai Eran (haggai-eran)]

I offered a patch for this issue to metacity in 2010 (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612940), that would mirror the window title. They didn't accept it, since they said it should have been up to the theme designer to choose whether to mirror, or to implement a different theme for RTL. The first method would work for Ubuntu's theme, but not for more complicated themes such as Crux. I tried to start discussing the extensions required to the theme files, but never got any response.