Re: Thunderbird extension for switching to RTL

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Ayman Hourieh <aymanh at gmail dot com> wrote:
> The extension sets the direction to RTL by changing the dir attribute
> of the message's body to rtl, so English text will show up
> right-to-left too.
> 
> AFAIK, there is no other way to change direction in Mozilla-based editors.

Ouch...  Sounds like Bidi needs to be integrated ASAP.  We all know that
the browsers (be it mozilla proper or firefox) have Bidi, could there be
something there that one can adopt for ThunderBird ?  Is anyone working
on ThunderBird even talking about Bidi ?  If not then a bug report akin
to "Need to add Bidirectionality (bidi) functionality" with a reference
to Unicode's TR#9 might help along with a note that the browsers already
do that.

> One way to solve the probem would be div tags, the user highlights a
> paragraph and hits a toolbar button to change the dir of the div.
> 
> I don't think it's that hard to implement, but I'm still new to XUL,
> and documentation isn't that complete, so in many cases it requires
> checking the code of other extensions to figure out things, but if
> there is demand on it, I can try to do it.

Ayman, I think those are midterm hacks (I wouldn't even call 'em solutions).
If you end-up doing that then do under the banner of "learning" or "for fun"
:-) since it will not really solve Arabic users' needs.  Only Bidi will.
Meanwhile, and I don't know if ThunderBird offers this or not, you can
spawn Katoob (or similar) and "do the right thing" (as Katoob has proper
Arabic support) then have it passed back the email contents back to TB
(or vice versa for reading) for consumption.

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail