Last modified: 2013-01-18 05:09:00 UTC
Text selection works in reverse in right-to-left languages. If i select several lines in an article in Hebrew, the first line is selected from the middle to the *beginning*, and the last line is selected from the *end* to the middle. Screenshot attached. Tested on Sony Xperia Neo, Android 2.3.4, app version 1.1 alpha1.
Created attachment 9949 [details] a screenshot with selected text in Hebrew This screenshot shows selected text in a Hebrew article. Notice that since the text runs right-to-left, the first selected line is supposed to be selected from the middle to its left end, but in the reality it is selected to the right end, which is actually the line's beginning.
Created attachment 9950 [details] a screenshot with selected text in Hebrew on the Opera Mobile browser In this screenshot the same text in the same article in Hebrew is selected on the Opera Mobile browser. It works correctly right-to-left. It's possible that the Opera developers implemented it manually in their browser. In the phone's built-in browser it is broken as in the Wikipedia app. If you are using the build-on browser, this may be an upstream bug.
(The Opera screenshot has some other rendering problems, but the selection direction is correct.)
I don't have a device here to test with, but if you checkout the source and put it on a server of your own, this would be easy to check by going to /assets/www/index.html I tested it here with plain safari, and as far as i can tell all markers that should take care of this seem to be in place, so this might be an Android bug. Another thing that might be problematic here is the scroller code. something to test.
We won't do further work on the PhoneGap-based app, which will be retired in favor of a native app in near future.