RTL Languages

[Tim]

We have received requests over the years for Bible Analyzer to better support Right-To-Left languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Persian (or Farci). We recently received a request from Great Britain for the Persian language from a brother who evangelizes Iranian immigrants.

The issue was the GUI and page display tools Bible Analyzer uses does not support RTL languages mixed with English very well. However, since there was a need I did some hacking around and added some code to mirror certain elements in the Bible Panel, ref. popups, and MultiWindow displays and got a nice working system for RTL languages.

Here is an image of the Westminster Leningrad Codex w/Strongs Numbers and below it an image of the Smith/Van Dyke Arabic Bible.

wlc.png (36.35 KiB) Viewed 16136 times

svd.png (31.81 KiB) Viewed 16136 times

These will be available within the next couple weeks or so. We will announce it here in the forum and newsletter.

[rokas]

Westminster Leningrad Codex w/Strongs Numbers is awesome!

[darrel_jw]

Has this been uploaded yet? I just downloaded WLCs and it still displays as left-to-right.

[darrel_jw]

Either I am missing something or RTL is not implemented yet? Please help.

Darrel

[darrel_jw]

Do I have to go into the interlinear to see RTL? Does the bible window not show RTL?

Darrel

[Tim]

Windows will do RTL in the Bible panel, Linux won't.

[darrel_jw]

So it is not an issue with Linux, but the way you have coded in BA. Both Xiphos and Unique Bible App display RTL beautifully (these are Linux apps!). theWord, which is a Windows app that runs under Wine, displays RTL perfectly.

Darrel

[Tim]

I'm not sure why you want to argue this, but a few years ago RTL texts DID display correctly in Linux in the Bible Analyzer Bible panel. Linux made a significant change to their window manager and broke the RTL functionality with the wxWidgets/wxPython window page display manager. It still doesn't work.

To get the BA Interlinear to work on Linux I had to use a completely different page manager, an HTML display which is the core of most web browsers. That way Linux users can view the text correctly even though the regular Bible Panel can't.

It would take a huge amount of work to convert the Bible panel to a different page display like the Interlinear and Lord only knows if it will ever be done, but the Interlinear display will do essentially everything that can be done in the Bible panel so I'm not sure what the issue is.

[darrel_jw]

The big issue is the interlinear only uses WLCi, so my other Hebrew bibles are left at LTR.