Fix RTL for Arabic, Persian and Hebrew languages

[Amr]

i trying to use your product but you have problem with Arabic Text From 2015  ( https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/9580-adding-arabic-text/ )

and now after 4 Years with version 1.7 still with no arabic text  , how i change Adobe if u can't fix this stupid bug with RTL , Please help us with that problem , you put Hebrew and Arabic in Typography only

we need fast fix please

thanks

[MEB]

Hi Amr,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
As said in the original post this is something we do plan to implement but not in the short/medium term. There's still a lot of work in other areas that must be done first, sorry.

[Musaed]

On 2/2/2019 at 3:13 PM, MEB said:

Hi Amr,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
As said in the original post this is something we do plan to implement but not in the short/medium term. There's still a lot of work in other areas that must be done first, sorry.

Deflating answer. I'm glad I renewed Adobe CC.

[Amr Hassan]

On 2/2/2019 at 2:13 PM, MEB said:

Hi Amr,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
As said in the original post this is something we do plan to implement but not in the short/medium term. There's still a lot of work in other areas that must be done first, sorry.

Welcome To Affinity poor :) 

this no new in RTL i think Musaed is right to renewed his Adobe CC first step in any project Multi Language in egypt we 100 Million Person if we have 2 Million Work on Graphic Design u lose them i talk about egypt only at least u got 100 thousand from 2 Million if you fix ur small bugs :D 

 

[fde101]

22 hours ago, Amr Hassan said:

if you fix ur small bugs

This is not a bug.  It is a feature that does not yet exist.

[Distill7]

They don't have a text shaping engine for complex text as of now, actually they never had. And with their luck of expertise in the matter and unwilling to prioritize it, I guess we'll have to wait for 3-5 years.I

Inthe meanwhile, you can use 3rd party apps and websites like "tadween" you write the Arabic text and it shifts the direction and uses the correct glyph for the letter position. This works with one line text only, for multi-line text like books, this won't work.

What amazes me is that serif is a small company, they have no experience in developing text shaping engines for CTL, and such task requires a long time. They can use the open source HarfBuzz, Windows Unitext, or MacOs core text shaping engines as a solution, but the problem is that they're unwilling to.

[dominik]

9 hours ago, toutou123 said:

but the problem is that they're unwilling to.

Can you please point to an official statement that proofes or at least shows their 'unwillingness'?

Thanks,
d.

[Distill7]

On 2/2/2019 at 1:13 PM, MEB said:

As said in the original post this is something we do plan to implement but not in the short/medium term. There's still a lot of work in other areas that must be done first, sorry.

 

27 minutes ago, dominik said:

Can you please point to an official statement that proofes or at least shows their 'unwillingness'?

That's a quote from an official moderator. It's not that they don't wanna implement it at all, they won't won't work on it in the short and medium time.

[dominik]

1 hour ago, toutou123 said:

 

That's a quote from an official moderator. It's not that they don't wanna implement it at all, they won't won't work on it in the short and medium time.

Thanks. That's the only quote I know about and I do not consider this unwillingness. But that is just my interpretation. I strongly believe that they are very aware of the lack of support for other languages than left to right. There must be some other reasons that have kept them from implementing this. Personally I doubt they are not 'not willing' to do so.

Anyway, enjoy the sun. Cheers,
d.

[Distill7]

4 hours ago, dominik said:

Thanks. That's the only quote I know about and I do not consider this unwillingness. But that is just my interpretation. I strongly believe that they are very aware of the lack of support for other languages than left to right. There must be some other reasons that have kept them from implementing this. Personally I doubt they are not 'not willing' to do so.

Anyway, enjoy the sun. Cheers,
d.

They have only 67 employees, and they didn't even do it with the serif plus lineup, so they have no expertise in this matter.

I hope that they consider using 3rd party tools like Harfbuzz, it can provide a faster solution.

[dominik]

25 minutes ago, toutou123 said:

so they have no expertise in this matter.

You seem to know more than I do.

I sincerely hope for users around the world that the capability of various text directions will be implemented sooner than later. I cannot imagine that they started the Affinity range from start without that in mind 

d.

[Alfred]

33 minutes ago, toutou123 said:

They have only 67 employees, and they didn't even do it with the serif plus lineup, so they have no expertise in this matter.

I hope that they consider using 3rd party tools like Harfbuzz, it can provide a faster solution.

Where did you get the “67 employees” info? That number sounds a little low.

As for lack of expertise, I agree. There were actually ‘Middle East’ editions of three version X5 applications in the Plus series — supporting Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, if I remember correctly — but those were only achieved via an agreement with WinSoft International (and their cooperation didn’t last beyond that version).

[Distill7]

13 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Where did you get the “67 employees” info? That number sounds a little low.

I got that number from their LinkedIn page.

There is an open source complex text engine called HarfBuzz, Google pushed it's development and it's the one that renders Arabic, Hindi text... In chrome, android, PS4, Linux, LibreOffice, Scribes...

I think using it is better than re-inventing the wheel.

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, toutou123 said:

I got that number from their LinkedIn page.

I just checked: it currently says “69 employees on LinkedIn”. But please note that the number only tells us how many of their employees are on LinkedIn, which will be less than the total employee count.

[Patrick Connor]

19 minutes ago, Alfred said:

But please note that the number only tells us how many of their employees are on LinkedIn, which will be less than the total employee count

Or more than the employee count if any ex-employees have not updated their LinkedIn ! So basically it's unreliable but approximately correct.

[Archangel]

I think they might not want to use an open source text engine because they are attempting to make an as fast as possible engine of their own. Although theoretically they could adapt open source algorithms and optimize them to create new code, I am not sure how feasible that would be,

[MikeW]

3 hours ago, toutou123 said:

I got that number from their LinkedIn page.

There is an open source complex text engine called HarfBuzz, Google pushed it's development and it's the one that renders Arabic, Hindi text... In chrome, android, PS4, Linux, LibreOffice, Scribes...

I think using it is better than re-inventing the wheel.

Serif has already "re-invented" the wheel by choosing to write their own text engine. And it works very well. Serif will include RTL languages. And...

8 hours ago, dominik said:

...I strongly believe that they are very aware of the lack of support for other languages than left to right. There must be some other reasons that have kept them from implementing this. Personally I doubt they are not 'not willing' to do so...

And not all LTR languages are yet supported at this time. Complex shaping LTR scripts are not currently possible.

[dominik]

16 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Complex shaping LTR scripts are not currently possible.

Sorry for my ignorance. Can you, please, elaborate a little more about this? I'm asking out of curiosity, not doubting this 

d.

[MikeW]

48 minutes ago, dominik said:

Sorry for my ignorance. Can you, please, elaborate a little more about this? I'm asking out of curiosity, not doubting this 

d.

Indic scripts are LTR. They are considered complex scripts and Affinity applications cannot use such languages. There are others.

[dominik]

5 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Indic scripts are LTR. They are considered complex scripts and Affinity applications cannot use such languages. There are others.

Thank you for the explanation. I now have a better understanding and remember having seen related posts on the forum.

I still believe (or at least hope) that Serif will come up with something that covers all of these different languages.

d.

[MikeW]

Just now, dominik said:

Thank you for the explanation. I now have a better understanding and remember having seen related posts on the forum.

I still believe (or at least hope) that Serif will come up with something that covers all of these different languages.

d.

I suspect complex LTR will come first as for the most part, it has to do with (maybe completely) via adding the OpenType features required to handle the substitutions needed.

[dominik]

6 minutes ago, MikeW said:

I suspect complex LTR will come first as for the most part, it has to do with (maybe completely) via adding the OpenType features required to handle the substitutions needed.

All of this seems to be very demanding to bring together. Another hint why it takes its time.

Part of my job is responsive webdesign. I imagine different text flows are even more of a can of worms 

d.

[Glicky]

On 6/29/2019 at 9:14 AM, dominik said:

Can you please point to an official statement that proofes or at least shows their 'unwillingness'?

Hi dominik.

Here you can found the reason why they are unwilling to add support for RTL and Complex scripts in the near future. . When i asked Serif directly via email if they would add this support, that's what they answered me:

"We understand that there is a large number of users who require RTL support, but it is not something that can be created quickly. There are a lot of intangibles with the different RTL languages, that do not come in to play with Latin languages. Latin languages are very formulaic in there composition, where as right to left languages can vary from Arabic to Hebrew, or from Persian to Urdu. We don't just need to implement the ability to right from right to left, we also need to ensure that all of the technical aspects of these languages are working correctly.

We are a tiny company with limited resources. We will do what we can we with the resources that we have. We do not want to focus the coming years focusing on one feature, and if it is something that is feasible then it will be included in the future."

---

So, it sounds that we'll have to wait a long time, until we will have support for complex scripts and rtl languages in affinity.  

Bt"w, in my opinion it's worth to hire programmers only for this purpose. it's a 100 percent guarantee they will get back the money (With large percentages) very fast, taking in mind  that they are opening the way for new hundreds of thousands of graphic designers (and maybe millions over the time) who can't work without this supports.

 

[dominik]

2 minutes ago, Glicky said:

Hi dominik.

Here you can found the reason why they are unwilling to add support for RTL and Complex scripts in the near future. . When i asked Serif directly via email if they would add this support, that's what they answered me:

"We understand that there is a large number of users who require RTL support, but it is not something that can be created quickly. There are a lot of intangibles with the different RTL languages, that do not come in to play with Latin languages. Latin languages are very formulaic in there composition, where as right to left languages can vary from Arabic to Hebrew, or from Persian to Urdu. We don't just need to implement the ability to right from right to left, we also need to ensure that all of the technical aspects of these languages are working correctly.

We are a tiny company with limited resources. We will do what we can we with the resources that we have. We do not want to focus the coming years focusing on one feature, and if it is something that is feasible then it will be included in the future."

Many thanks for the quote. It's a confirmation to support different languages from LTR is a difficult task to acomplish. Still I wish them all of luck to get this done.

d.

[ashf]

There is no Arabic UI, so I do understand why Affinity doesn't support RTL yet.
But I don't understand why Affinity doesn't support Chinese/Japanese properly even though it has UI in those languages.
How can Affinity claims itself as a "pro" design app without proper text handling?
That's not pro.
Without proper text handling, it's almost useless especially in publishing/printing industry.