[Bug 571822] Re: Empathy allign RTL text as LTR text on messenger

[Simon McVittie]

This was bounced from project to project and ended up in telepathy-spec
at <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30396>.

However, I'm not sure whether this is actually relevant to telepathy-
spec, because I don't think the communication between Empathy and its
MSN backend should need to specify the text direction if it can be
detected automatically.

Is it meant to be possible to auto-detect alignment from the text of the
message? It seems to be, since if I copy "שרה" from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text and send it between my
XMPP accounts, the edit box displays it right-aligned (however, the
conversation history displays it left-aligned).

So, I think there are really three bugs here, of which we can't fix (B):

(A) For all protocols, Empathy should auto-detect whether the text
should be RTL, and if so, right-align the text in the conversation
history

(B) (not fixable by us!) MSN on Windows should auto-detect whether the
text should be RTL in the same way as (A), rather than relying on the
RL=1 flag

(C) To work around (B), telepathy-butterfly (which Empathy uses for MSN)
should auto-detect whether the text should be RTL, and if so, set the
RL=1 flag when it sends it to the MSN server

People who speak RTL languages: does that sound like a reasonable course
of action?

** Bug watch added: freedesktop.org Bugzilla #30396
   http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30396

-- 
Empathy allign RTL text as LTR text on messenger
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/571822
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