1416145 - RTL (BIDI) Languges Support

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 464436

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Mohsen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20171003101344

Steps to reproduce:

When i try to write a message in my language (Persian) i have some problem.
Actually my language is based on RTL (Right To Left) so i need to write from right to left. Maybe you think i should use text alignment but that is not true way. Because when i write an English word in between Persian words caused clutter. So in most popular text editors we have an option to switch between RTL and LTR and that option support BIDI.
The best way was use RTL (BIDI) plugins. but for now they are discontinued and incompatibility in latest version of Thunderbird.
So why you don't add this option to the core of Thunderbird?


Actual results:

I can't use RTL languages


Expected results:

I have a button to switch between RTL and LTR languages.

Comment 1

[Eyal Rozenberg]

BiDi Mail UI (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/bidi-mail-ui/) is not discontinued. It will continue to be supported on whatever version of Thundebird on which it can be. Can't say I'm exactly sure what that's going to mean, but I haven't given up.

Comment 2

[Shachar Shemesh]

Hi Eyal,

Not to undermine the wonderful work you've done on bidi-mail-ui, but it is simply insufficient. It changes the way paragraphs are created and handled in Thunderbird, introduces caret bugs (see bug #1645546), and generally has integration problems. I'm sure some of those are actually problems with Thunderbird itself, but it is hard to get them looked at when the answer to "does it happen in safe mode" is "no".

It is high time Thunderbird followed every other self-respecting program out there and support Unicode out of the box, including BiDi.

Bidi-mail-ui is much better than nothing, but there is no reason for it to be needed.

Comment 3

[Eyal Rozenberg]

@Shachar: Of course it's insufficient, I didn't suggest otherwise. And, indeed, that's essentially due to problems with TB itself. But TB is falling under our feet as we speak, some of it just going away and other parts being replaced.

I also believe TB should properly support bidirectionality out of the box. Sadly, I don't see this being much of a priority at the moment. There's a vicious cycle of the existing user-base has almost no people using BiDi languages, so no outcry for bidi support, so no work on bidi support, so no gain of BiDi language users.

Comment 4

[eladhen2]

As of the release of Thunderbird 78 the BiDi Mail UI is not supported anymore.

This lack of RTL support has just become acute. Sadly, it seems I need to search for another client ASAP...

Comment 5

[Eyal Rozenberg]

I hope to try and rewrite my extension to support TB 78 - but this will take quite a while, if it is at all possible (not entirely clear). Personally I'm sticking to TB 68 until I can get around to this, but it is indeed an acute problem. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of pressure (=basically none) from speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to ensure proper RTL functionality.