Last modified: 2008-07-12 20:27:27 UTC
Dear friends, What's the problem: The majority of contributors to LTR wiki projects have problems with the way edits are made in RTL projects. In a RTL wiki - you type "[[" and you see "]]" - you type "}}" and you see "{{" - you type "</span>" in the last line and you se "<</span" - you type "Dear friend!" and you see "!Dear friend" Beside these characters "|" display differently in the "editor", also all punctuation characters as .,:;*#"' ... which would inherit RTL properties. Feature request: It would be a great help for many contributors if the textbox of the "edit window" could be set independend of the LTR / RTL nature of the "content language" / selected user interface. Just let the choice to the users what they prefer. This should be achieved as follows: a) as a parameter in [[special:Preferences]] b) as a setting in monobook.css / monobook.js Devlopers should decide about priorities if both ways are specified and comunicate this to the community how it works as soon as the feature is implemented. I assume that the feature about a *common LTR / RTL nature* should be "relevant" for all type of objects used as "input mechanisms" also the "Summary" inputbox, the "Search / Go" inputbox, the "<inputbox>" inputbox etc. (What I mean is that no parameters / variables should be required for each box.) I hope this would be a great improuvement / help for contributors who make minor edits as inserting Interlanguage links, images, correcting or adding alternative writings (Latin, Russian, ...) or spellings (IPA, ...). *Finaly* I hope that most browsers would support to have on one hand one kind of displaying text (LTR / RTL) for the "preview" but would allow in parallel to chose the "oposite" way to edit the text in the textboxes, inputboxes etc. If this is not the case please drop a note, mark this report as browser dependend and open a bug report in the relevant racking system. Thanks in advance. regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
*note* As a workaround it is possible today - to use one browser window with an LTR edit sandbox as from :en: or http://hu.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=project:sandbox&action=edit - to make there your work and - to use copy and paste to another browser window with the destination RTL edit page.
An alternative usefull also for *anonymous* editors (which can not safe preferences) would be to add a control object (for example a radio button) that toggles between RTL / LTR. It could be beside the "This is a minor edit" / "Watch this page" control boxes. Default seting should be same as *content language*. It's configuration should influence the LTR / RTL properties of both the textinput area and the inputbox of the sumary. If possible it's value should be preserved between edits at different pages.
special:Emailuser also has a textbox the feature should be available here as well
I've published some work-around bookmarklets for controlling direction at [[meta:User:Zigger/Bookmarklets]].
*addition* Maybe this can be implemented together with an paramater ?edit=foo / &edit=foo where foo is either "ltr" or "rtl". It would be great if this parameter could be preserved during sessions. See similar request for ?uselang=xx / &uselang=xx at Bug 4125: feature request: preserve ?uselang=xx / &uselang=xx during sessions
You can just toggle the text direction with Ctrl+LeftShift in Internet Explorer, or Ctrl+Shift+X in Mozilla (maybe you should turn the hidden preference "bidi.browser.ui" on before you can do that).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 8213 ***
