International Web Design

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.