Forum .LRN Q&A: swapping tables and messages boxes to make it clear for arabic translation

hello, i am working on the arabic translation. when translating to arabic which is read in the opposite way of english form right to left, the text boxes seems funny because they are before the identification of the box when reading form right to left.

so what will be the best solution of swapping the message text and the boxes and as well make the layout looks better for arabic or any right to left written language.

if any one thought or did something similar please help me.

i was thinking in the following solution:

one will be putting and if else statment that wrappes the desired code and test if the local is AR_LB and rewright the approriate code for arabic display (just in the presentation files) but that will be a big hassel. and will expend the code.

In addition, the problem of the pictures messages used,
i need to changes these as well, i am thinging if you can send me all the pictures used and i will try to make them in arabic then i will send them back with the same name appended with _AR and i will change the links to the new ones ... is this a good idea?

finally when the server will be updated, because i changed the file that make the calender work for AR_LB but i am still waiting for the updates to start testing the calendar.

thanks for your help

Dany Elmassih

Wouldn't it make sense to support language specific adp files? Or better, assign a template style (like index_mystyle.adp) to languages?
Perhaps we also might group similar types of languages? Japanese can be either left-to-right-top-to-bottom or top-to-bottom-right-to-left, for example. So the IF statements would get pretty long in the templates if we did them for each language.

But then there would be version control issues if every language had its own template.

if i what to change the templates files so it suites the arabic language, how can change the codes. i am only have the permition to translate the messages using this servers. how can i change the codes. please any one can help me in this.
Does acs-lang already support the template according to the language ? ( index-en_US.adp ).

I use this in acs 3.x.

It would be fine if it will work with etp.

A colleague of mine in Heidelberg pointed me to this resource on mirroring shortly after the original post: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/steps/WRG_mirror.mspx

If you do not get answers here on technical questions that are relevant for OpenACS in general try the OpenACS Development Forum:
https://openacs.org/forums/forum-view?forum_id=14014

Have we found a good solution to this yet? I have a Hebrew site going live soon (Greenpeace Israel), and I managed to get almost everything working exactly as it should by adding

<html dir="rtl">

to blank-master.adp

I was thinking of writing up a small text on the problems I encountered, if anyone is interested.

Sorry - I found your message in another thread where you describe my solution 😊
Japanese can be either left-to-right-top-to-bottom or top-to-bottom-right-to-left. In practice Japanese (and most CJK languages) are written left-to-right-top-to-bottom in any modern context, e.g. on computers.