New Features in TiddlyWIki 5.3.0: The BIDI Text

[Mohammad]

TiddlyWiki 5.3.0p supports bidirectional text. While a tiddler cannot have both RTL and LTR text at the same time, but you can have tiddler with RTL now.

I am not sure how many users in the forum uses RTL texts (Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, …) but feedback are highly welcome.

NOTE: A tiddler can have both LTR and RTL text at the same time, BUT TiddlyWiki show the direction based on first line of text in a tiddler, this is a limitation and I hope this can be addressed in future release. In other word a real BIDI is not implemented yet.

[Springer]

Presumably we could also then get columns ordered right to left, in which case Japanese and Chinese formalized vertical text would display properly (assuming “columns” are reduced to a single character width).

[Mohammad]

@Springer

Presumably we could also then get columns ordered right to left, in which case Japanese and Chinese

I think so! please give a try on https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease when you have time. See my end note in OP.

[Springer]

Hm, vertical right-to-left is not especially helped by the new RTL pragma (getting the columns to wrap correctly is too tricky). But in testing I confirmed that old-style Japanese text flow already works fine (in 5.2.x) with css:

[arcsin]

Could someone please provide a guide on how to write an RTL tiddler?
I tried to just create a new tiddler and write in Persian, but it stays in LTR both in the editor and in the tiddler.

[Springer]

Here’s one demo using the dir specification — although I don’t understand anything about Persian, so I’m just blindly pasting in a bit of what claims to be Persian text at a css demo site. Also, I’m guessing you’d want to tweak the editor to work properly with the process of input for Persian, about which I have no insight. Still, proof of concept for displaying correctly?

Support within TiddlyWiki is present, but this is basic html/css stuff that TW is supporting. Here’s one online discussion, from which I grabbed that text above:

Right to Left Styling 101

[TW_Tones]

If RTL can be set via a class it may be as simple as either creating a section with that class

<section class=rtl>
text in rtl
</section>

Or set the tiddlers class field to rtl for whole of tiddler rtl;

Either way if you also have a ltr class you can reverse it with another section if needed.

So this tiddler tagged $:/tags/Stylesheet

.rtl {
  direction: rtl;
}
.ltr {
  direction: ltr;
}

You can then do this;

<section class=rtl>
content by me
</section>
No class
<section class=rtl>
content by me
   <section class=ltr>
     content by me
   </section>
</section>
<section class=ltr>
content by me
</section>

I added rtl to the tiddlers class field and it throw all elements to the right, but not the edit mode, so we need a little more specificity.

• I Imagin authors of RTL may like an editor that behaves the same way.

The body of the tiddler uses the class tc-tiddler-body so this may be used to make it specific.

• Can CSS guru please tell us how?

[Edited] Nice resource Right-to-left Styling

[arcsin]

I already found the manual implementation for RTL on there, but I thought this feature was implemented in newer releases (it doesn’t work in 5.3.4 prerelease). I mean the thing was shown on there.
@Mohammad Could you please shed some light on the status of the BIDI improvements?

[Mohammad]

Hi @arcsin
Unfortunately RTL support was dropped from TiddlyWiki 5.3.x.

@jeremyruston can explain this.

I know two workarounds can be used. One is based on css, like the one you listed or the one by Springer and TW_Tones. The other is a JS solution which overwrite core tiddlers.
I will share them here, once I get my desk.