It's really a bit more complicated than that, to do it right. People don't just use LTR or RTL. There's a lot of mixed text, and people use a mix of applications which are and aren't localized to RTL languages.
When the languages are intermixed, there's two different ways for things to behave -- it boils down to which direction is "primary", and which one is the one that's considered embedded. This affects a whole lot of things, like selection behavior. To do it right, these should all be coordinated, rather than a bunch of individual settings. So if you are using English, but an occasional bit of Arabic, the scroll bars should remain on the right. But if you're reading Arabic text, with an occasional American name or an English Technical term, then they should be on the left. This is why it's not really right to be doing this yourself. (I realize you don't have a choice at the moment, I'm talking about how things should be in theory). So I hope they can get their RTL stuff working well and to users before too many people have to do it the hard way like you have. There's a third orientation of text as well! The CJK scripts -- Chinese, Japanese, Korean -- are traditionally written top-to-bottom, right-to-left. But everyone is accustomed to working with these languages LTR as well, so support for this is generally considered less important. Arabic, because of the way the letters connect (and change depending on what they're connected to), just won't work LTR! Still, the top-down format remains in widespread use. LTR was first used in 1915, according to Wikipedia., but there are still many contexts and purposes people would find LTR surprising. Japanese manga (comic books) are nearly always written top-to bottom, as are most advertisements, etc. Handling the world's writing systems is a complex task! With English, we have it easy -- the worst we have to deal with are variable-width fonts and capital/lower-case distinctions, and a tiny alphabet. On Mar 29, 3:53 am, emna zeddini <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > Just I have a l suggestion, why don't you in the futur add a field in which > android users can > choose between left side or right side scrollbars so that you satisfy the > needs of both RTL and LTR > languages. > Best regards. > > 2010/3/27 emna zeddini <[email protected]> > > > > > Hello,. > > Is there a way to have a scrollbar on the left side? > > Thanks in advance -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
