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Fix RTL for Arabic, Persian and Hebrew languages


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15 minutes ago, amirgelman said:

the “Sofit” letters ... have dedicated keys in our keyboard

Of course. The point I was trying to make is that when typing Hebrew text as LTR the user might expect to be able to use the regular forms of those letters, leaving it to your software to make the substitution when it flips the text.

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31 minutes ago, Sam Neil said:

It is really a shame

It is a pity but it is no shame. It's rather a shame to blame Serif. Their decisions were done for certain reasons users even don't need to know to currently realise their profit enabled by Affinity. Maybe the apps were still much less developed with RTL as main focus from the beginning. Yes, the apps aren't helpful for multilingual projects and the workflow can suffer already if LTR only is required within a document by the lack of global layers for instance. Even if Affinity will never be suitable for such situations they are for many others. – It may rather be seen as a shame still to need different languages at all (or not to get taught or learn fitting ones at least) in 1 world.

Note that this particular team for global, international software and/or UI design appears to be founded not before 2018:

Quote

Our Adobe International Design team was founded in 2018, as Adobe began intensifying its focus on creating experiences that are relevant in any part of the globe. (...)
In 2019, International Design developed both the International Design Guideline and Bi-Directionality Guideline.
https://medium.com/adobe-international-design/six-lessons-to-design-for-the-world-aaf847bf8c51

 

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1 hour ago, amirgelman said:

BUT at the same time, my team and I know nothing about “giving up” nor do we wanna take any part in such way of thinking. (...) 

I’m trying to find a few Arabic speaking people (and hopefully some of the other RTL languages speakers) who could join in with this project.

When you noted 3 weeks ago "the app exists and is actually 95% percent ready" it recalled my experience that the last 10% of a project to get it perfectly fitting to my ideas often feels like another 90% of work. – I appreciate your engagement, your recent video looks quite promising already! 👍

Perhaps you can find helpful co-workers in the open source community, for instance...

https://gist.github.com/amrza/04658c71ac02d82580855f89b9b3dff4

https://awesomeopensource.com/project/01walid/awesome-arabic

https://awesomeopensource.com/project/duolingo/rtl-viewpager?categoryPage=38

(this site's search engine doesn't work for me, instead I used a web search with "keywords site:URL")

P.S.: I still have in mind that I used a scripted solution for RTL in InDesign before the app supported it natively. So, even if you may not make your tool work right now it possibly may become easier when Affinity will offer a script interface – possibly before its RTL support, who knows.
I assume that Serif has set itself the goal of programming a correct and error-free user interface for its RTL implementation – a requirement that you do not necessarily have to meet for your expansion as a single feature, which gives you a certain advantage over Serif, and a profit for Serif this way, too.

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38 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Note that this particular team for global, international software and/or UI design appears to be founded not before 2018:

And? - 12 Years ago I was working as a dev in a quite huge project (but with fewer dev team people, by far not as much as Affinity has) we had build a software for a world wide operating company. Languages to support have been among all those the company operates in, namely ...

support-for.jpg.688ff645d8b16f5a8dc4cc00fb4edab4.jpg

That software was used around the globe, even in languages none of us devs were able to talk or write a word in (so languages we ourselves had no clue of). But we even supported those in our software and also made continously based updates for all those to us foreign and somehow unknown localisations. - I recall that we used (via a big packet MSDN subscription) a bunch of of foreign language Win OS versions. Also the help of client related country reps (diverse native language speakers) to accomplish all that. - However, nowadays software dev tools etc. have even much better support for language based specifics than things have been 12 years ago.

The whole is thus overall more a matter of concept, design and organization for supporting such things at all.

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22 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

And? - 12 Years ago I was working as a dev in a quite huge project
(...) The whole is thus overall more a matter of concept, design and organization for supporting such things at all.

No 'And'. The linked article just shows that 'international software design' at certain spots still is a young 'industry'. No doubt, there have been previous teams doing multilingual software (I guess it also was ~ 12 years ago when InDesign supported RTL?).

Yes, naturally the concept is essential, like in general jobs start with + depend on their concept quality and its details. But, just guessing, compared to your former project for a specific client, his specific tasks (text, communication, database?) and possibly even for a specific OS version only, the situation for Affinity to me appears more complex. Though I must admit not to know much about programming I assume, especially visual design related features with its required range of text style options demand different and more detailed treatment of code than maybe a global but company-internal software does require, as it may not have the need to deliver that variety of tools + options for creating visual design of text.

However, even if Serif would make its initial decision nowadays differently, it would not help to solve the current situation more easy or faster. – But possibly you with your experience and skills can, at Serif or artwayz, support the development, seriously.

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3 hours ago, thomaso said:

...his specific tasks (text, communication, database?) and possibly even for a specific OS version only, the situation for Affinity to me appears more complex....

That software used a local app related DB which alone was bigger than 3-4 GB, in order to keep over (>)80.000 and growing machines, parts, spare parts, components, service contracts, exploded views, descriptions, manuals, certificates ... all of course country-specific, country regulators dependent and so on. The software had to create/generate offers, cost estimates, configuration overviews, machine descriptions, sales invoices etc. Thus it not only took a bunch of client rep typed inputs in any supported language, but also had to generate various different sized and formated output documents (including text, calcs, pictures, diagrams, tables, etc.) via report generators, of course also in all supported languages. Further the software was contructed to continously autoupdate via build in mechanisms from everywhere in the world (via connections to the clients head-quarter servers), so new or changed language region specific code, data and contents could be added, replaced, exchanged etc. on the fly. It had carefully designed build-in ticket, update and data transfer mechanisms (also for on the fly bug fixing modules). It was mainly run on Win OS laptops by the clients world wide operating reps, the apps frontend itself was OS portable/independently developed, the underlayed used DB generally exchangable, but for the client reps which all had Win laptops, MS-SQL was used those days (the client had enough inexpensive 1000er licenses of those). The software was able to connect to the customer's SAP mainframe (a client key requirement, beside a bunch of other things) for bidirectional data exchange. - Thus all in all I doubt the Affinity products have to fight with overall more compexity here nowadays.

 

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4 hours ago, thomaso said:

However, even if Serif would make its initial decision nowadays differently, it would not help to solve the current situation more easy or faster.

Not sure what you mean here with "initial decision"?

BTW, on the specs page for the Affinity software I can clearly read ...

Quote
Languages
  • English (US and GB)
  • German
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Japanese
  • Italian
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Russian

... so they officially didn't claimed there to support actually other languages than those. - Further they can add support for additional languages over time.

In relation to RTL/bidirectional writing I believe their used GUI stuff and app generated and reused text components generally might support those things in the one or other way. They probably have just to be setup and enabled accordingly to keep track of the state they are used in docs for input/output generation and dependent occurences. Further they would need to have some people, which are then familiar with these foreign languages, in writing and word, so that these people can test and confirm the correctness of the overall language handling.

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38 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

so they officially didn't claimed there to support actually other languages than those.

Those look like the UI languages, though, not a claim about what languages (or scripts) can be used within documents.

-- Walt
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3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Those look like the UI languages, though, not a claim about what languages (or scripts) can be used within documents.

What's the difference in this context and doesn't a list of supported UI languages here implies, that at least those are officially supposed to be supported in docs then for you? - Further where is any written down statement on their websites, about what languages can be used within documents in their products?

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33 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

What's the difference in this context and doesn't a list of supported UI languages here implies, that at least those are officially supposed to be supported in docs then for you? - Further where is any written down statement on their websites, about what languages can be used within documents in their products?

It is a relevant difference that this list shows UI languages only. It would not make much sense to list languages which can be used in the documents. Not only this list would be extremely long, also a language doesn't necessarily stick to a specific script (latin, cyrillic, syllabaries, logographies etc) or writing system (LTR, RTL). So, as supplement to the UI languages it may be useful to mention writing systems in the specs. Is this what you miss? I am not sure what's the point in your quote from the specs page. We knew already that no RTL is supported, didn't we? Or did you expect to find RTL in the list you quoted?

p.s.: v_kyr, mit "initial decision" meine ich die ursprüngliche Konzept-Entscheidung nur mit LTR zu starten and RTL später als Ergänzung zu entwickeln. Könnte ja sein, dass sie das inzwischen lieber anders entschieden hätten, aber sie können dieses Rad natürlich nicht zurückdrehen.

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24 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Further where is any written down statement on their websites, about what languages can be used within documents in their products?

There isn't a statement like that, as far as I know.

But users might appreciate having at least a statement that LTR languages/scripts are supported, but RTL languages/scripts are not. Though perhaps Serif just expects users to discover that during their free trial period, if it's important to them. I can understand the marketing team not wanting to specifically state limitations like that; marketers generally don't discuss missing functions or negatives about their products.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But users might appreciate having at least a statement that LTR languages/scripts are supported, but RTL languages/scripts are not.

Indic scripts are LTR but are not supported. Potential users might not appreciate being misled about their support.

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> Indic scripts are LTR but are not supported. Potential users might not appreciate being misled about their support.

That may be a reason not to mention it at all. Even mentioning supported scripts only (not Affinity document languages or writing systems) may result in a long list and might demand to mention languages, for instance for the script groups of syllabaries and logographies, which currently include some Asian languages but not all. Edit: Also potentially confusing if mentioned as script: Arabic and Hebrew scripts are supported, too, while their according writing system isn't.

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49 minutes ago, thomaso said:

So, as supplement to the UI languages it may be useful to mention writing systems in the specs. Is this what you miss? I am not sure what's the point in your quote from the specs page.

No. The point I was going to make is, if nothing else is officially as languages specified for a product, you can't expect more then those things officially named also not really for script writing support. In other words, I can't expect it to support arabic/hebrew etc. language writing, if nobody from the software vendor officially confirms (on product specs and the like) that these languages are supported.

40 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But users might appreciate having at least a statement that LTR languages/scripts are supported, but RTL languages/scripts are not. Though perhaps Serif just expects users to discover that during their free trial period, if it's important to them. I can understand the marketing team not wanting to specifically state limitations like that ...

My point is there is no official statement in the listed specs, so I can't assume either.

Quote

...marketers generally don't discuss missing functions or negatives about their products.

For many reasons as we all who work in the IT domain know. - But we also know that if something isn't officially named, it's usually not really supported then.

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v_kyr, I entirely agree (almost), I solely don't understand what made you post in particular the documented UI languages. Nobody reported to be missing an info about unsupported features, users simply miss one, no, actually many, which is quite normal for a software like this and in its stage.

21 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

(...) But we also know that if something isn't officially named, it's usually not really supported then.

I think it's not true for some features, e.g. colours or page sizes. They aren't documented, neither with a range or min or max values. Inspite of not being mentioned users would not think they aren't supported. Note: years ago PDF page size was limited to max 5 meters. And more years ago app colours can have been limited, too.

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15 minutes ago, thomaso said:

v_kyr, I entirely agree, I solely don't understand what made you post in particular the documented UI languages.

The spec page does name there languages and not UI languages or localisations. - Supplied default dictionaries are also just those here and nothing else.

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Do you 'just' miss the specs being texted more precise? – If yes, I'd miss the entire "Technical" > "Overview" content being more precise and less marketing speech. Words like stylish, massive, new, fast, stunning etc. are simply too simple + complex, too, to be in fact "technical" and to express a clear information. In particular "professional" might mislead professionals. – But this is nothing which belongs to this thread, isn't it?

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36 minutes ago, thomaso said:

I think it's not true for some features, e.g. colours or page sizes. They aren't documented, neither with a range or min or max values. Inspite of not being mentioned users would not think they aren't supported.

That was meant to be more generic for overall marketing approaches, so something common and nothing just Affinity specific.

For colors etc. those are named (encripted) in a different color/doc support context, which at least do imply some of those things if somebody knows one or two things about software and color handling ...

 

Quote

Professionelle Farben

  • Echter CMYK-Workflow von Anfang bis Ende
  • Breite Palette an Farbmodellen – RGB, RGB Hex, LAB, CMYK und Graustufen
  • ICC-Farbverwaltung mit Profilen und Umwandlung
  • Monitor-, Drucker- und Papierprofile aus Apple ColorSync (nur für Desktop-Computer)
  • Nahtloser Wechsel zwischen den Farbmodi während der Arbeit
  • Kopieren von HEX-Werten in die Zwischenablage
  • Arbeiten mit Pantone®-Farben
  • Neu
    Festlegen von Rendering Intent und Schwarzpunkt-Kompensation (als globale Werte und bei der Umwandlung von Dokumenten)
  • Farbmodus-übergreifendes Arbeiten mit ausgewählten Anpassungen
  • Vollständiger OpenColorIO-Workflow (OCIO)
  • Schutzfunktion, um ein versehentliches Wechseln in andere Farbmodi zu verhindern (nur für Desktop-Computer)

Unterstützung für 16 Bits pro Kanal

  • Modus mit 16 Bits pro Kanal für RGB-, LAB-, Graustufen-Farbräume
  • Inklusive 16-Bit-Versionen aller Filter
  • Funktioniert mit sämtlicher unterstützter Hardware – ohne Einschränkungen
    ...
    ...
Quote

Unkompliziertes Einrichten mit dem Dialogfeld „Neues Dokument“ (nur für Desktop-Computer)

  • Neu Vorschauminiaturen
  • Neu Vorgaben für unterschiedliche Ausgabetypen, wie z. B. Web
  • Neu Entwerfen und Speichern eigener Seitenvorgaben
  • Neu Zugreifen auf Affinity-Vorlagen (.aftemplate)

 

However, a named language support is IMO quite something different more basic and essientiell here in contrast.

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12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Do you 'just' miss the specs being texted more precise?

I thought I made above pretty clear what the point was and why I referenced the above named language support from the specs. - We are now going somehow in rambling circles here, which brings nothing for the initial RTL topic of this thread. Thus it's better to let those speak here, which are really affected by this theme and which do try to solve it in some for them correct working manner. Since marketing blabla and the like finally doesn't help those people here and might also lead to false overall expectations then.

So back to the main point, which was to enable some RTL writing support in a pleasing way for those which have to deal with that on a daily base.

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Come on, these lists are obviously not precise in all of their chapters and misleading this way. Besides emotional wording they also include partially not entirely true info, for instance in "Performance", since the macOS technology "Metal" causes issues when activated for specific tools, e.g. Blur Brush Tool. – But it would not help anybody if this list would be perfect and failure-free because then it could not be get human-read but would need to be used like a database file which requires a separate UI to filter and sort the available content. Not to mention the need for daily updates according to currently logged issues.

EDIT: we appear to be cross-posting. Sorry.

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10 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Come on, these lists are obviously not precise in all of their chapters and misleading...

Agreed, that's flowery marketing speech and far from concrete facts. But hey that's the way of cookie crumbles and the way they advertize there stuff.

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5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

There isn't a statement like that, as far as I know.

But users might appreciate having at least a statement that LTR languages/scripts are supported, but RTL languages/scripts are not. Though perhaps Serif just expects users to discover that during their free trial period, if it's important to them. I can understand the marketing team not wanting to specifically state limitations like that; marketers generally don't discuss missing functions or negatives about their products.

the thing is most of the marketing (even if it's a un-sponsored social media content it's still marketing even if it's free) this software gets is "it's a discount version of software X and it's as good as X can be." and although it's not Serif's direct marketing target (maybe?!) the social media is always introduce it like that. (just type affinity in youtube and watch the x vs y videos flow!) so usually people might get the software and try the environment and performance of their key elements (like smart fill for example) and assume that other things are "as the should be". It's a poor assumption but I think this is the case most of the time.

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7 hours ago, Weekend said:

It's a poor assumption but I think this is the case most of the time.

True, but I would not blame Serif for what others say; they can only be responsible for their own marketing statements.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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  • 2 weeks later...

You cannot type in Arabic, Hindi or Urdu, but there is a way to do it. Type any thing in MS Word copy the text go to Edit > Paste Special in Affinity and select "Enhanced Windows Metafile". Hope that should solve your problem for the time being.

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