RTL text problems on GitHub

[xaur]

Turns out GitHub does not fully support RTL (right to left) text yet, eg. Arabic, Hebrew, etc.

Investigate how to mitigate this.

Does not work:

• GitHub diff viewers
  • [x] Unified
  • [x] Split
  • [x] Rich

What may work with workarounds

• comments in issues and PRs [1]

Things to try

GitHub:

• try that unicode character that sets text direction
  • does it make markdown renderer work? what about diff viewer?

GitHub Pages:

• custom CSS for Jekyll theme [1]
• custom template for Jekyll theme
• lightweight markup language other than Markdown

Git workflow:

• local diff software software
• local git software (required by local diff software)

Alternatives:

• GitLab

Investigate:

• Whether GitHub announced any plans for full RTL support.

[1] https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/147

[xaur]

We have GitHub pages working with a simple CSS hack.

[xaur]

Something to research to achieve perfect rendering of a mix of RTL and LTR text is Bi-directional text:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text
• https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/

Then what we can try to use is

• special Unicode characters to fine-tune text direction in small blocks of LTR text
• HTML tags that can be seamlessly inserted in Markdown

[ahangarha]

Github doesn't want to solve this simple problem. I can fix bidi with ease. But there is no willing from their side.

And this is what Free Software and Open Source community deserve when they use a proprietary platform.

[xaur]

Upon a quick search for RTL-capable text editors I got an impression that corporations backing them (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) do not hurry to fix RTL issues in that software as well.

Looking back at our trivial CSS hacks for @Insaf01 's decred-arabic and decred-journal-ar I believe it's not prohibitively hard to code proper bidi support.

@ahangarha did you have better bidi experience with other Git/Markdown hostings? Could be a good argument for our research of GitHub alternatives (#69).

[ahangarha]

Gitlab has no issue. Doing anything with css is wrong.

I have fixed this issue on Plume and FluxBB as well. I know how it should be addressed and solved.

در تاریخ پنجشنبه ۳ اکتبر ۲۰۱۹،‏ ۱۵:۵۹ xaur notifications@github.com نوشت:

Upon a quick search for RTL-capable text editors I got an impression https://github.com/decredcommunity/issues/issues/114#issuecomment-464912034 that corporations backing them (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) do not hurry to fix RTL issues in that software as well.

Looking back at our trivial CSS hacks for @Insaf01 https://github.com/Insaf01 's decred-arabic https://github.com/Insaf01/decred-arabic and decred-journal-ar https://github.com/Insaf01/decred-journal-ar I believe it's not prohibitively hard to code proper bidi support.

@ahangarha https://github.com/ahangarha did you have better bidi experience with other Git/Markdown hostings? Could be a good argument for our research of GitHub alternatives (#69 https://github.com/decredcommunity/issues/issues/69).

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