Right to left languages

From the CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.

How to enable right to left languages on CouchSurfing?

A commented example of RTL and LTR conflicts

I expect the biggest problem in this case would be to combine the RTL (Right-to-Left) with the LTR.

CSS does have a property for text direction (I'm not a web designer, but I have a basic understanding of CSS in a general way), but if you type in Hebrew inside a Left-to-Right paragraph, you get a big mess. It's more extreme than align-right. Changing the direction reverses the position of the punctuation so it appears at the left side of a line, instead of the right.

What this means, in essence, is that while the entire interface would be in Hebrew/Arabic/Chinese, and right-aligned, the messages and texts on the members' profiles would appear mangled and deformed, because their punctuation and everything would get screwed up.

Text may appear broken and in the wrong order when combining to directions of text.

One thing you might consider trying is reversing the structure of the page on an exact one-to-one basis, while giving individual sections their own property. So, for instance, if we're looking at a member's profile, the list of their username, their age, their occupation, would be on the right, aligned right, in Hebrew. But the text describing themselves would be aligned left, inside the table, because most users would write in English anyway.

I'm not sure exactly how this is done, but like I told Chris, it works almost perfectly when I do it through Firefox's right-click->Switch page direction. If you can try it on your computer I don't think you need hebrew on it), see what it looks like. There's some graphics that need to be replaced, like the edges on the tabs, but you'll notice that the locations work.

When reversing the text, the problems of RTL text are transferred to the English text, and the other language appears to sort itself out.

But if you want to get a good idea of what the text is supposed to look like in Hebrew, you can just take a screenshot and flip it horizontally. The text will look ridiculous -- which is fine, after all it's "Hebrew" -- but you'll know exactly what needs to be reversed and what doesn't.

Are there any right-to-lefters on the web team? I wish I knew enough HTML/CSS to get involved...

Here's a random link from Google regarding rtl and CSS. http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/align.html