Re: [docbook-apps] RTL in markup/docbook/??

[Markus Schütz <markus dot schuetz at datadax dot de>]

Hi Mohammed,

there are several ways to turn your flow of text into the "right direction".
(1) With HTML, the most effective one seems to use the BDO element (an 
inliner) and the DIR attribute to specifiy the text direction. For 
example, use:

<p>Some left to right text <bdo dir="rtl">Some right to left text</bdo> 
Some more ltr...<p>

The DIR attribute is also available for several other elements in HTML 
4.01, most notably P and BODY. This will also right-align your text in 
the browser.
Just have a look at the HTML spec for more information. 
(e.g.http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.2)
I don't know how the different browsers support this, but I'm confident 
that at least the most prominent will do.
(2) It is true that the current FOP release (0.20.5) does not support 
BIDI. But there are some hacks to serve that purpose. Maybe you will 
find some more information on the FOP mailing list at 
http://xml.apache.org/fop/maillist.html. The forthcomimg release of FOP 
(1.0) is said to support BIDI.
As far as I know, the remaining suspects (namely XEP by RenderX and XSL 
Formatter by Antenna House) support BIDI. But these are commercial tools.

Regards,
Markus

Mohammed Elzubeir escribió:

> Salam,
>
> I am trying (helplessly) to figure out how to use DocBook/XML to produce
> Arabic documentation. This is probably not the first time I approach
> this issue, but I am going at it again.
>
> At Arabeyes [1], we use DocBook/XML for all our documentation.
> Unfortunately, for the Arabic documents we have two problems:
>
> 1. The HTML output is in LTR mode (should be in RTL)
> 2. None of the XSL-Fo's I know of (we use Apache's FOP [2]) can handle
>   Arabic text (not the UTF-8 nor the bidi mode).
>
> Currently, what we have been doing is adding a CSS that sets the
> direction to rtl. This is not a good enough solution, since browsers are
> instructed that they can happily ignore those in CSS [3]. It is noted
> that this should be in the mark-up. 
>
> So, where in all of this do we go from here? I am completely lost!
>
> References:
> [1] http://www.arabeyes.org/
> [2] http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/#IDAMJFO
>
> Regards
>  



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