@mkupper said in Notepad++ in Right-To-Left (RTL) mode:
Keep in mind that while something like Notepad++ looks like text it’s a graphical display.
This really is the heart of the issue. What the end-user sees in the edit window gets there by a system-dependant pipeline that starts by loading the font file, mapping a character to physical keystrokes (or IME input), measuring the size of the client area to be filled by the character, drawing it, then recomposing the client area all over again by shifting every other character that was already there. By that point, we are as far removed from Scintilla and Notepad++ as this conversation has come.
Text direction is entirely up to the graphics device, which varies widely across platforms, and Scintilla has to maintain support for 3 of them (maybe 4, if we include Qt, which is really just an obsessively object-oriented wrapper atop the C-language libraries underpinning the given operating system). Worse, Notepad++ has always used the oldest, most backward-compatible APIs the Windows platform has to offer, and legacy GDI’s concept of RTL is literally a geometric flip called “mirroring”: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/localizability/mirroring-in-win32
@JamesWebb said in Notepad++ in Right-To-Left (RTL) mode:
@mkupper said in Notepad++ in Right-To-Left (RTL) mode:
We are surrounded by structural racism and/or discrimination.
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Apology. But I’m not agree. 😉
I think @mkupper was talking more about 30 years ago, when, for example, the GDI interface was written, by American engineers, who obviously didn’t care enough about international users to bother writing APIs that could properly draw “foreign” languages. Their design choices actually do prejudice the user experience of Persian, Arabic and Hebrew speakers. But nobody on this forum can do anything about that, or needs to apologize for it.
There is no shortage of word processing software that can intelligently produce text in a variety of international languages. Notepad++ is currently not one of them.