[Thunar-dev] RTL Languages and Thunar

[Benedikt Meurer]

Yo'av Moshe wrote:
> Hello.
> This is a problem I saw on an old Thunar version, but I don't believe
> it's fixed since I never saw it being reported. I never succsed
> compiling xfce-dev-tools, so I can't check it...
> 
> It's a bit hard to explain, but I'll do my best.
> 
> I'm a native Hebrew speaker. It's an RTL language - it's written from
> Right to Left.
> 
> When GTK+ sees an RTL locale setted, it aligns the window as
> apropriate. Text goes from right to left, and so are all the widgets.
> This is where the problem rises: If I start Thunar with an RTL locale
> (e.g. he_IL), I can see only hebrew labels beneath the icons. The
> English ones are messed up - not placed in the correctly. If Thunar is
> started with an LTR locale (en_US), only english labels are shown
> right, and the hebrew ones are placed out-of-place.
> 
> The result is that for people who use RTL languages (Mostly Hebrew and
> Arabic, AFAIK), Thunar isn't quite usable.

Not sure if I got you right, but I think I fixed this recently (Pango
tried to detect the direction automatically, instead of using the text
direction from the Gtk setting for the icon view).

You can try this with older Thunar versions, adding a line

 pango_layout_set_auto_dir (text_renderer->layout, FALSE);

to thunar_text_renderer_set_widget() in thunar-text-renderer.c, after
the pango layout is created, i.e. after the line

 text_renderer->layout = pango_layout_new (context);

> Yo'av.

Benedikt