Mixing right-to-left and left-to-right text

  • Unknown's avatar
    alicht2014 · Member ·

    I am doing my first baby steps in WP.com for a simple personal blog [so WP.org in not an option], using Twenty Eleven as a theme. The language is set to Hebrew but my texts intermix right-to-left and left-to-right texts all the time – namely, Hebrew and English. The results are very poor: every time an English word is used the line sequence breaks.

    This seems like a known problem. For a recent reference see
    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/having-difficulty-in-writing-right-to-left-language-pashto-in-online-editor?replies=7

    My question/request: Is there a way to do this in WP.com?

    Thanks

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    alicht2014 · Member ·

    An addendum:
    A theme called NotesIL used to handle Hebrew and English well in terms of RTL/LTR flow, but it has been retired…

    Does anybody know a theme that may be based on it?

  • Unknown's avatar
    alexjgustafson · Member ·

    Howdy!

    Like you mentioned, this is a known problem and the mixture of right-to-left language and left-to-right language is very much dependent on WordPress software handling the input. Any given theme isn’t likely to handle it completely accurately, but I could see where a themes design might make the discrepancy less pronounced.

    With that said, you can find a list of the themes that best support right-to-left languages here:

    https://theme.wordpress.com/themes/features/rtl-language-support/

    I’d recommend previewing several themes, viewing a blog post with both RTL and LTR text in it, to see if any of them compensate more to your liking.

    -Alex G.

  • Unknown's avatar
    alicht2014 · Member ·

    Thanks, Alex!
    Will try.
    Amir

  • Unknown's avatar
    alicht2014 · Member ·

    Hi Alex,
    Thanks again for the list. I walked through it and looked for a theme that might a simple personal blog with academic commentary.

    At least a couple themes have problems in showing Hebrew content. Some of this is browser issues. You may want to contact KathrynWP about this. For example:

    Twenty Eleven – This one doesn’t support mixing RTL/LTR. It shouldn’t be inlcuded in the list at all.
    Yoko – Most of the text doesn’t show.
    Shaan – The headline blinks for a split second and disappears; the metadata is confused.
    Chunk – The headline blinks for a split second and disappears.
    Ari – Most of the text doesn’t show.

    Hope this helps.
    Happy Holidays!

  • Unknown's avatar
    alexjgustafson · Member ·

    Hi Amir,

    I made a test blog with only Hebrew content and did not experience these errors:

    So it would seem that these themes do not minimize the errors associated with RTL/LTR mixing as you’d hope and would not be a good choice for your blog. However, they don’t appear to be malfunctioning with RTL in general.

    Truly supporting the mixture of a right-to-left language and left-to-right language content goes beyond the realm what themes are meant to do. Like we discussed before, we’ve not yet found the best way to handle that in the core WordPress software.

    No theme is going to completely compensate for the issue, I would like to think one of them might handle it slightly better for your use, but I don’t know for sure.

    Twenty Eleven – This one doesn’t support mixing RTL/LTR. It shouldn’t be inlcuded in the list at all.

    The list provided is meant to be themes that can support RTL languages, but that’s under the assumption that the content of the site will only be RTL, not a mix of RTL and LTR.

    On my RTL-only site, Twenty Eleven appeared to handle RTL text appropriately. Did you find instances where Twenty Eleven mishandle RTL text that wasn’t associated with a place that RTL and LTR mixed?

    If so, I’d be happy to investigate and report the error to our theme team.

    —

    Let me know if you find other issues during your theme search. If none of them meet your liking you may want to pursue other avenues to help overcome the language mixing issue, like these:

    • For the passages you’d normally write in English, write them in Hebrew and provide links to Google Translate
    • Create a second blog in English that contains your notes, and link to that within your Hebrew content

    I’ll also make sure to alert you here if we do get the RTL / LTR mixing to work properly.

    -Alex G.

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Does this earlier forum post help? https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/bilingual-posts-hebrew-english?replies=1

    Otherwise I’d suggest posting here if you haven’t, even if it takes a while for a reply. http://he.forums.wordpress.com/forum/support

  • Unknown's avatar
    alicht2014 · Member ·

    JustJennifer, thanks! Will follow those links.

    Alex, those screenshots do look lovely. From my exchange with KathrynWP it appears that the issues may stem from using IE as a browser. By now I have settled for Twenty Twelve, which may be dry-looking but fits my needs and displays Hebrew well.

    With regard to the known problem of bi-directional editing in WP, a workable solution – though not an ideal one – is to edit separately in Word and then copy-paste into WP. This is something that WP may want to resolve.

    Btw, I have encountered a similar problem with Moodle – an open-source system for academic teaching. The IT team in my institution resolved it by using a different editor module that can handle within-sentence LTR-RTL changes. Again, this is something that WP may want to adopt.

    Thanks,
    Amir

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