I'm working
on an international site built in Movable Type and including statements
in multiple languages, including "Right to Left" languages like Arabic
and Hebrew.
I was pleasantly surprised when I cut-and-pasted an Arabic text from
MS Word into Movable Type and found the letters looking good both in
the MT entry box and the resultant post. I didn't realize just how powerful UTF-8 encoding
is and how well MT supports it throughout the system. Still, the output
wasn't correct, as it wasn't displayed in right-to-left fashion. I
needed to figure out the CSS for this kind of output and an easy way to allow the client to set this without forcing them into coding.
Using the highly-recommended Rightfields Plugin I added a checkbox field for posts that should be displayed in RTL. Here's a screenshot:
RightFields has an IF function that we can use to set a new DIV with our RTL style. Here's the coding in the MT template, stuck in just after the "entry-body" div:
<MTExtraFields>
<MTIfExtraField field="RTL">
<div class="rtl-display">
</MTIfExtraField>
Note: you'll also have to add similar code to close the div at the end of the passage.
Finally, as best as I can determine, this is the proper CSS designation for RTF display (Microsoft has a good webpage on this). It works in Firefox, IE7 and IE6.
.rtl-display p {direction:rtl;text-align:justified;text-align:justify;}
I'd be happy to get any feedback or corrections to this. I'm a typical 'Merican
whose foreign language skills don't go far past a dozen phrases lifted
from Sesame Street and long-ago French classes. Arabic and Hebrew
typesetting are quite unfamiliar terrain.
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