[Koha] Right To Left in Arabic KOHA

[Arslan Farooq]

Hi Ruth :)

This will be very very, very cool. Thank you so much.

Take good care,
arslan


> I've had occasion recently to look this problem over, despite not being a
> speaker of any right-to-left languages, and there are two major parts of
> the problem here:
>
> 1) String translation (which Koha handles with Pootle)
> 2) Layout translation (things flushing right instead of left, table column
> order, and so on).
>
> Koha handles the string-translation part very well, *if* the translation
> team has done that work; many translations remain only partial, so there
> are still lots of English words appearing on the pages.  Naturally, anyone
> bilingual who wants to help Koha grow should be encouraged to participate
> (at http://translate.koha-community.org) in getting the strings
> translated!
>
> The layout-translation?  Not so much.  The code automatically inserts
> 'dir="rtl"' in the html tag at the page header, for languages so
> designated, but the default CSS still contains many 'float: left' and
> 'text-align: left' directives, which causes the pages to look very strange
> for right-to-left readers.  It is that problem I've been looking into, and
> I believe I have a solution in the works; it is functioning on my OPAC test
> server on my laptop, with English and Arabic installed, and behaving the
> way I would expect it to.
>
> My solution has four requirements:
>   1) It cannot disrupt left-to-right pages; if a library has both English
> and Arabic as choices, both need to work.
>   2) It should be generalized, so that any RTL language can use it.
>   3) It should be semi-automatic; at most, a system-preference needs to be
> set to make it work.
>   4) It should *not* be a complete new set of templates, which would make
> upkeep a bigger problem.
>
> The approach I'm testing right now meets all four of these requirements;
> you just translate the templates with the script at
> misc/translator/translate, as you do now, and enable the language in the
> system preferences, as you do now, and it Just Works.   There is still some
> CSS tweaking and testing to be done, and the task of extending the solution
> into the staff client, but I'm on it.
>
> After I finish this patch, hopefully in the next week or two, I will be
> releasing it for the community; it should easily apply to 3.6.x, 3.8.x, and
> master.
>