938098 - Homescreen is broken in RTL locale

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::System::Lockscreen, defect)

Description

[arky [:arky]]

Attachment: Peak-Arabic-Homescreen.jpg

Homescreen is skewed in Arabic locale. 

Test Device: Peak
Gonk: Geeksphone nightly build
Gaia: latest master

Comment 1

[Andreas Gal :gal]

Can you try again and post a couple screen shots of things that are wrong? Also, screenshot is showing lock screen and an old lock screen, not the current one. Can we try the current lock screen and the current home screen?

Comment 2

[arky [:arky]]

Will try again and post the results here shortly.

Comment 3

[(no longer active)]

How does one get an RTL build?  I can't read Arabic but I'm interested in QAing things a bit!

Comment 4

[arky [:arky]]

Great Ehsan! Here are the steps.  
https://l10n.etherpad.mozilla.org/gaia-multilocale?

Usually I do some testing either on my laptop with (Firefox Nightly, Desktop builds) or on the device itself.

Comment 5

[arky [:arky]]

Attachment: Gaia-homescreen-arabic.png

Gaia lock screen in Arabic. 

Device: Ungai
Gaia: Master ( 8d6f78aa13eb876f6949f7eaed100d0f2fd42fc0)

Comment 6

[Andreas Gal :gal]

Ehsan, we need a little post to dev-gaia what to avoid for RTL (relying on implicit left to right ordering of elements etc). I don't think most of our gaia engineers understand what to watch out for. Who could help with this? I don't think the fixes are difficult.

Comment 7

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to Andreas Gal :gal from comment #6)
> Ehsan, we need a little post to dev-gaia what to avoid for RTL (relying on
> implicit left to right ordering of elements etc). I don't think most of our
> gaia engineers understand what to watch out for. Who could help with this? I
> don't think the fixes are difficult.

Years ago I helped set up this page <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Making_Sure_Your_Theme_Works_with_RTL_Locales> which was targeted at our front-end developers.  I would be happy to help prepare something similar for gaia as well.  Who should I get in touch with to help me understand what the usual conventions of creating the theme in gaia is?  I can fill in the gaps, write up something on MDN and then post it to dev-gaia with a little bit of guidance.

Comment 8

[Andreas Gal :gal]

Tim is one of our Gaia tech leads. Tim, could you connect with Ehsan? I want to help our Gaia devs write RTL-aware UI code.

Comment 9

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Tim is one of our Gaia tech leads. Tim, could you connect with Ehsan? I want to
> help our Gaia devs write RTL-aware UI code.

Thanks, I'll sync up with him over email.

Comment 10

[arky [:arky]]

Perhaps adding a RTL locale to Eng builds might help developers/QA to spot the problems quickly.

Comment 11

[Andreas Gal :gal]

arky, thats a great idea. Can you propose a language? Whats the most common RTL language?

Comment 12

[arky [:arky]]

(In reply to Andreas Gal :gal from comment #11)
> arky, thats a great idea. Can you propose a language? Whats the most common
> RTL language?

Looking at my supported languages data[1]. I think Arabic(ar) is best choice taking into account the speaker population and wide support on various mobile phones.


[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyQQzAGdWYUdFQ2Q3FpNTRvWjJjYVlsVnRPTEVNR1E&usp=drive_web#gid=0

Comment 13

[Andreas Gal :gal]

Arky, do you want to lead this effort? Just reach out to dev-gaia and propose to add Arabic to engineering builds and explain the rationale. I am sure people will agree. We might need some fonts for Arabic by default as well.

Comment 14

[arky [:arky]]

(In reply to Andreas Gal :gal from comment #13)
> Arky, do you want to lead this effort? Just reach out to dev-gaia and
> propose to add Arabic to engineering builds and explain the rationale. 

Sure, I'll reach out and try to make this happen.

Comment 15

[Ahmed Nefzaoui [:Nefzaoui]]

** Sorry for the noise **
Since 2.0 will be shipping a complete different approach for Homescreen (Bug 989848) that doesn't include horizontal swiping, I'm closing all bugs related to _2.0_ and are about current Homescreen in favor of Bug 1008013.

Comment 16

[Peter Bylenga [:PBylenga]]

Mass Edit: adding the [rtl-meta]