Wordpress-android: "True" support for RTL languages

[maxme]

The app works with RTL languages, but it's not a true RTL support (everything should be reversed: UI elements too, drawer, back button, checkboxes, FAB, etc.)

This is what happen when I add android:supportsRtl="true" to our manifest:

(we should wait for the redesign before tackling this issue)

[tonyr59h]

This one is straightforward but will touch many of the layout files. Since I'm working the other language issue I figured this would be appropriate to tackle in case we have RTL language users.

There's a bug on Samsung devices that will crash if paddingStart or paddingEnd is defined and run pre API 17. In order to get around it we simply define a new resource file with -ldrtl-v17 directory.

Other than that bug all I'll be doing is adding End/Start attributes for margins and layout alignments. Per the docs

[rachelmcr]

I checked and confirmed that RTL support is still an issue in alpha-13. Some text is aligned correctly but other text is not aligned correctly and the icons/design is not reversed as expected.

This issue was also raised in an app store review (3 stars).

[tonyr59h]

Thanks for the update :) It'd be nice to have this working but most of our bandwidth is being consumed on Calypsoification at the moment. There's only a few features left on that front so hopefully this will get some attention in a few releases.

[daniloercoli]

I think we should allocate resources to work on this ticket asap, regardless of the current status of FluxC and Calypsoification. This ticket is near to be 2 years old now, and I think it's not acceptable for us to have an app that doesn't scale/work well on RTL languages.

[tonyr59h]

Updating all the padding/margins to use Start/End seemed to work well enough. Most icons and some text are on the wrong side, sometimes due to layout decisions (which are easy to adjust).

[tonyr59h]

Material guidelines for supporting bi-directionality. It has some interesting information regarding icon and interactive UI element mirroring.

cc @mattmiklic, this may be of interest 😃

[tonyr59h]

Updating the configuration is a fairly fragmented process. I think we'll only be able to support API 17+ devices for RTL layout changes if the device language is set to LTR. For API 17+ we can use setLayoutDirection to force an update.

Some of the layouts aren't mirrored even if both the device and app language is set to RTL. They'll need some layout adjustments.

[tonyr59h]

There's a new method introduced in API 25 that deprecates the old method. That leaves us with:

• API 16: cannot force RTL, it's set based on device language
• API 17-24: use setLayoutDirection +updateConfiguration which are deprecated in API 25
• API 25: use createConfigurationContext method

After finding some strange behavior I put together a sample app to sort the details out.

[ChrissiePollock]

An internal request for this #196170-h.

[rachelsquirrel]

I have a user who reports that none of the site titles appear when they change the language to Arabic. They've given us a screenshot:

They all appear when he changes to English.

197167-h

[hypest]

Another manifestation of the issue is reported (by @ChrissiePollock ) for the comments list:

p4a5px-1WN-p2