Hello, I'm working on the BiDi implementation of Lazarus, and there are few things that require a lot of thinking regarding what we want to achieve with Lazarus behavior.
For example, if TApplication.BidiMode (I have added support for it with the help of Paul) is set to bdRightToLeft, should every TControl and TMenu base compoents should be automatically be aligned to right or the developer must choose the direction regardless of TApplication.BidiMode ? The Pro's for Auto Alignment: * The program will be suited for any right to left language (at the moment Hebrew and Arabic, Paul made it more elastic to add additional languages if needed). * The developer does not need to set direction by hand (unless they want to make sure the direction of the ui is as they wish to have) * We have better indication for the mode we are at inside a TControl base component (instead of setting it by hand). * I can finally start providing better looking software with Hebrew that are not aligned to the left (it looks really bad and it is hard to use). The Cons/problems: * How should anchors react ? a right anchor should be left or should remain right ? * What happen if the locale is Hebrew (for example) but the language of the program is English. it will be very unusable to do it automaticlly. * Each UI toolkit display things differently with bidi direction and there is no standard look. (Should Lazarus decide on such for the developers ?) * How can we control the direction progrematicly when needed, even when we set the OI to work with bdLeftToRight. * What happen with UI toolkits such as GTK1.2 and fpGUI that does not support BiDi ? Another issue is the translation of Lazarus. I wish to make sure that some (and not all) of the UI of Lazarus itself will be right to left when for example I use the Hebrew language in the IDE. How should I approach the issue ? Things to be aligned to the right is the menus and the Object Inspector tabs, and all of the dialogs, but not the rest of the environment. not the editor or the OI grid etc.. I need to know where and how to do such work. Thanks, Ido -- http://ik.homelinux.org/ _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
