234894 - Arabic text is left aligned

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 119857

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[minacross]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

I live in Egypt and use Arabic as my default language.
I use TB 0.5 and I have a little problem:
when I write a new message in Arabic I choose Arabic(Windows-1256) character
coding. I write the message the sellect the text and coose format >> Align >>
Right (Arabic is written from right to left.
when I try to receive the message I sent, I find that the characters are correct
but the text is left aligned !
Is there a fix for thie?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. press 'Write button'
2. choose Arabic (windows-1256) character coding and then write the message.
3. select the text the m choose format > align > right and send the message.


Actual Results:  
receive the message you sent, you will find all the text left aligned.

Expected Results:  
the Arabic text should be right aligned.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The dupe is ostensibly about plain-text mail; however, there some information 
there about an extension that provides better UI for this for HTML mail.  See 
also bug 96057.

For HTML, there is a way to get there via the UI, not trivial but not hard:
 Format-> Page Colors and Background-> Advanced Edit-> HTML Attributes
   Attribute=dir;  Value=rtl

You can save a template with this setting, which you can then use to start a new 
message (by going to the Templates folder and double-clicking) -- unfortunately 
template support is sorely lacking, and you can't use a template for replies, 
forwards, or mailto: links.  

There are additional problem with this setting thru TB 0.7 and Moz 1.7, altho 
they've been fixed in current nightlies: 
  1) once you've set the 'dir' attribute in one HTML message, it will remain set 
for *some* later windows -- but opening a second compose window will revert to 
the previous setting.  The "correct" behavior is to always revert to LTR for a 
new message, unless using a template (bug 249882).
  2) when you save a template (or draft), the selected language encoding is lost 
unless there are characters in the text that require that encoding (bug 169761).


In Bugzilla, the Browser 'product' has a "Layout: BiDi Hebrew and Arabic" 
component, and Mail/News has "BiDi Hebrew and Arabic".

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 119857 ***