Support for RTL languages

odev954 commented 2 years ago

Please select if your request is either something new or an enhancement

[x] Enhancement of an existing Feature.
[x] Request of a new feature.

Please select the area your request applies to. (Multiple selections are possible. You can leave blank if you're not sure.)

[ ] Workspace - VSCode workspace, vaults, Intellisense/autocomplete, Dendron settings
[ ] Lookup - Dendron's Lookup Command
[x] Views - Dendron Preview, Tree View, Side Panels in the UI
[ ] Schema - Dendron Schemas
[ ] Pod - Data import from / export to Dendron
[ ] Publish - External Site Publish
[x] Markdown - Markdown features, such as syntax support and features

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

This feature request doesn't relate to a specific problem, yet I see it frustrating when many software and editors lack some of the features I would like to have when conducting research, creating knowledge bases, etc. I recently used Obsidian and I feel like the lack of a fully-featured markdown editor, as well as proper RTL support can affect the user experience.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like to have:

Fully-featured markdown editor (including custom styles and support in linking between notes): I use zaaack's markdown editor and it's a nice editor, which includes also a live preview feature and tools for stylizing the markdown document. The only thing that this editor misses is RTL support and note-to-note linking. If it could be combined with Dendron, I think it will boost up the user experience and compete with Obsidian.
support in RTL: some of the documents that I'm creating are written in Hebrew, and I needed to install a separate extension to support RTL and it's not the most convenient way to do it.
File tags: I know that I'm not the first to propose this idea, but tags are a really good way to organize notes categorize them. This feature is already existent in Obsidian and I think that many would be happy to see this feature in Dendron as well.

Describe alternatives you've considered

As I said, combining zaaack's markdown editor with Dendron could be a game-changer, and it will ease the workload that comes with organizing a knowledge base for a project or research. The only things that are needed to be added along with the editor are the note-to-note linking (with [[ operator) and RTL support.

Additional context

No additional context.

Thanks! :)

SeriousBug commented 2 years ago

Thanks for your suggestions!

For graphical editing, this is something we have planned but aren't actively working on at the moment.

Our team isn't very familiar with RTL languages as far as I'm aware, so we'd need some community help. I tried copying and pasting some RTL text into a Dendron note, it shows up in the editor and preview. I think it is aligned incorrectly (it's aligned like LTR text, to the left), is that the issue?

SeriousBug commented 2 years ago

There is support for tags in Dendron: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/8bc9b3f1-8508-4d3a-a2de-be9f12ef1821/

Does that cover what you're looking for, or are there other features you're looking for in tags?

odev954 commented 2 years ago

Hi @SeriousBug! Thanks for the quick response!

About the RTL, the issue that you described is correct - RTL text should be displayed from right to left. There are only several languages that needed this kind of support - Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian (as far as I know).

I did a little research and found several resources that might help to add support for RTL languages:

RTL in Markdown: a discussion I found in Stackoverflow. One of the proposed answers uses embedded HTML in the markdown file to add a div container with the direction set to RTL mode.
SimpleMDE - Markdown Editor (RTL): found this repo that includes an implementation of markdown editor that supports RTL languages. Maybe can be useful for the future development of a fully-functional markdown editor.
RTL codemirror demo + a nice blog that explains EVERYTHING: there is support for RTL languages in codemirror. I guess that vscode is using codemirror for its default text editor. This blog was posted in 2012, a fairly old post so I also checked all the issues that are associated with RTL language support in the codemirror repo, and this feature seems to be solid. Also, I checked if there is an option to mix RTL & LTR texts and view them correctly. I think this feature is still unsupported in codemirror (according to this question). Maybe it is worth opening an issue in the matter. Anyway, if you are looking to add the support in the default text editor I think this resource could help.

P.S: Thank you for the wiki page! I probably missed it... helped me a lot!

SeriousBug commented 2 years ago

Thanks for your answer!

For the editor itself, we unfortunately don't have much control over it. VSCode devs have to add proper support for it, and it looks like there's an open issue for this: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/11770

For published websites, it seems like you can set the text direction in CSS. This would be possible by adding a custom header to add your own CSS that marks the text as RTL, but I understand this is a tall ask.

I'll keep this issue open (and rename it) so we keep track of interest in RTL support in Dendron. I'd love to work on this feature right now but we're a bit busy at the moment, so we'll pick this up whenever we can.

babakfp commented 2 years ago

I'd love to work on this feature right now but we're a bit busy at the moment, so we'll pick this up whenever we can.

Can you fix this problem for vsCode itself? Or maybe a fully-featured extension, not for only markdown, but for every single scenario... I can write a whole document about how this fix needs to be done correctly. vsCode devs don't care about it and as far as I know, it is an issue since 2016!😤

dendronhq / dendron