Right-to-Left text support

[Holod]

Greetings, it seems the RTL text support is missing for Hebrew and Arabic languages when using Text Tool

The letters are in reverse order LTR, can this please be fixed ?

 

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Holod.

This is a function that has never been supported in the Affinity applications in V1, and which V2 has not added.

It would require a major development effort to include it, and Serif has not said when that might occur. It is not just something that can be "fixed", unfortunately.

[Holod]

32 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Holod.

This is a function that has never been supported in the Affinity applications in V1, and which V2 has not added.

It would require a major development effort to include it, and Serif has not said when that might occur. It is not just something that can be "fixed", unfortunately.

have they considered a simple text reverse button ?

my current workaround is to run the following code in browser DevTools console and get reversed text from that
 

const text_reverse = (text) => [...text].reverse().join("");

 

[walt.farrell]

They want to do it properly, which means it affects all the text layout functions as well as the character composition functions.

[Jemba]

A little bit disappointed that V2 still doesn't support RTL. There's no reason to upgrade to V2 for me, I guess. 

[dasOJO]

Oh, I just discovered that I actually can't use Persian text (that's why I'm here now). This is really very disappointing.

[Cendol]

I just downloaded the trial to use Affinity...and two minutes in this is a road block. It seems I will have to stick with Adobe until it is fixed :/

[Elian Gonzalez]

On 11/9/2022 at 1:52 PM, walt.farrell said:

t would require a major development effort to include it,

I have no doubt that it is not a question of merely adding in a couple lines of code or some quick update, but this description would seem to beggar belief: Pixelmator and ArtStudio Pro both support right-to-left text entry, not to mention Pages, Numbers, Keynote and even Word. The former two are not gigantic operations. If it's not Serif's priority, that's one thing, because they should just make it clear. But the notion that by itself, requiring "a major development effort" for an OS (either desktop or mobile) that has the support baked in can make one a bit skeptical. 

[Komatös]

45 minutes ago, Elian Gonzalez said:

 But the notion that by itself, requiring "a major development effort" for an OS (either desktop or mobile) that has the support baked in can make one a bit skeptical. 

The adaptation of the text engine is equivalent to a new development. 
For a rather small company like Serif, every development step must be economically calculable. 
After all, it's not enough just to redevelop the text input. Linguistic differences must also be taken into account.

All of this must be taken into account in a cost-benefit analysis.

[walt.farrell]

47 minutes ago, Elian Gonzalez said:

If it's not Serif's priority, that's one thing, because they should just make it clear.

It is a combination of difficulty (it's a large development effort) and priority (the item is perhaps not a big enough priority to justify the development effort).

[PaoloT]

4 hours ago, Elian Gonzalez said:

But the notion that by itself, requiring "a major development effort" for an OS (either desktop or mobile) that has the support baked in can make one a bit skeptical.

At least Publisher, I doubt it uses the OS text engine. Not even Pages uses it on the Mac. At the same time, I doubt any OS includes the text engine of a page layout program.

Paolo

 

[Cendol]

I wonder if Serif will at least acknowledge and tell us if they will ever support or not. If not, then I can just stop checking in hopes that I can ditch Adobe..

Edited July 22, 2023 by Cendol

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Cendol said:

I wonder if Serif will at least acknowledge and tell us if they will ever support or not.

I can’t imagine Serif ever stating unequivocally that they will not support it.

[cyberlizard]

I have a brilliant javascript for InDesign which flips text which is ideal for shorts burst of RTL text.  Hopefully sometime soon we'll get scripting support and then I can hopefully modify it to work with Publisher.

[Pšenda]

15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

It is a combination of difficulty (it's a large development effort) and priority (the item is perhaps not a big enough priority to justify the development effort).

It is not only about development costs vs profit - getting potential buyers of the application, but also about the lack of development capacity. Then redirecting these development capacities means suspending/postponing other work, thus delaying the development of new features and bug fixes, which in turn causes dissatisfaction and churn of existing users to other applications. Serif is simply a small company with a small development team (increasing the number of developers or buying technology would of course increase the price of the applications, and thus the possible loss of many existing customers), so it cannot satisfy all customers immediately, but it must consider all the consequences when setting priorities.

[Iron2Iron]

I too am very disappointed that RTL is not an option.  I do love affinity, but now I will have to find another source to do a large portion of my work that was intended for Affinity.  Again, I love Affinity so far, but I am really hoping that this becomes an option really soon. 

[KiwiMan]

Yes this is a major issue I have with Affinity! I need to manually flip every single line of text that is in Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi! Really considering using Adobe to get around this... is there anywhere we can complain to affinity about this issue? 

[MikeTO]

13 hours ago, KiwiMan said:

Yes this is a major issue I have with Affinity! I need to manually flip every single line of text that is in Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi! Really considering using Adobe to get around this... is there anywhere we can complain to affinity about this issue? 

Hi and welcome to the forums. This is the feedback forum so it's the appropriate place to request RTL support. You will find many posts on this subject if you search the forums for RTL so Serif is very aware of the demand for this feature.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=rtl&quick=1

[amirgelman]

I've been using RTL Fixer for a while and it works like magic!

It basically works alongside of Affinity (or any software that doesn't support right-to-left language for that matter)...

It not only works for continuous writing (fixing it as you type).
but it also works for copying and pasting.

Check it out at https://rtlfixer.com

[MC1]

On 1/18/2025 at 12:05 PM, amirgelman said:

I've been using RTL Fixer for a while and it works like magic!

It basically works alongside of Affinity (or any software that doesn't support right-to-left language for that matter)...

It not only works for continuous writing (fixing it as you type).
but it also works for copying and pasting.

Check it out at https://rtlfixer.com

Your post makes it sound like a satisfied user, I'm sure you are, but you have previously said you work for the company so maybe you can help me here as my support ticket has not been replied to yet and has been assigned a "low" priority.

I bought this plugin and it's not working when pasting multi-line text from an Excel cell into a text area box in Publisher... the text is correctly reversed, but the lines also paste in reverse order which makes it unusable.

I submitted a support ticket two days ago to see if the issue was the Excel file (which is from a professional translation agency) and your auto reply assigned it low priori, so I hope you can suggest a fix as I was assured in pre-sale emails there would be no issue in this use case (pasting from Excel to Publisher).