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Proposal: Arabic Language

How is it possible to ask questions in arabic? for example this sentence:

اللغة العربية من اليمين لليسار.

the full-stop is on the right not on the left.

كيف تكتب بالحروف رقم (650)

the ( bracket doesn't appear correctly.

So, wouldn't it be better if the RTL option was added?

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2 Answers 2

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You kind of get used to it frankly. Sentences still end it is just the first and last full stop will be before the sentence, i.e.:

مرحب. أنا ابراهيم وذهب إلى المسجد.

Punctuation is a bit of a complex one but as you an see here: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/14601/112766 brackets can work if they are not mixed with Latin characters.

For it to work you will need to write the entire question/answer in Arabic or English, including the numerals, i.e.: (٦٥٠)

As for the rtl option: it is a lot more complex than "just adding it". SE (Stack Exchange) was never truly designed for rtl and it seems much of their tech was implemented without thought for it and, of course, their web interface is not designed for it either.

So it s likely that it is something that will not be coming anytime soon. All rtl languages have to deal with this problem currently.

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  • I just realised there is a mistake in the Arabic, I wrote "he went" instead of "I went"
    – Sammaye
    Apr 26, 2015 at 18:36
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    I thought you were Arab cause of your name .. yes the sentence is wrong it should be .مرحبا أنا إبراهيم وذاهب إلى المسجد
    – Ahmed Elsawy
    Apr 27, 2015 at 9:35
  • @user37421 nah, I use Ibrahim as an Arab version of my name, my native name is in fact English
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 9:36
  • I'm against this idea of using to it .. because it's not a big deal to just align the text correctly it will be much better than writing in a wrong way ..
    – Ahmed Elsawy
    Apr 27, 2015 at 9:37
  • I went is ذهبت isn't it? I do remember SE adding the capacity to actuall align answer text via some add on, I guess the big problem is programmatically
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 9:44
  • Yes I went is ذهبت
    – Ahmed Elsawy
    Apr 27, 2015 at 9:52
  • @user37421 I mean the biggest problem will be if you interchange Latin with Arabic in the same line, then it won't be easy to see. For example your comment correcting my sentence is really hard for me to read since I have to second train my brain to see the break in the Arabic.
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 10:00
  • You can read it from right to left (the first line) and the second line from right to left ..
    – Ahmed Elsawy
    Apr 27, 2015 at 10:12
  • @user37421 it atually appears all on one line to me and masjid is on it's own line to me which means the sentence is back to front in ltr - rtl mind
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 10:33
  • @Sammaye, a point I want to make is that the tow numeral systems are arabic, the numerals you mentionned are used in the golf contries, in the other hand the other one (i.e 1,2,3..) is used in north Africa, and that is historically true, since the firsts are created in Baghdad from the indian numerals, and the later in north Africa. (of course the origin of the system is indian)
    – Swift
    Apr 27, 2015 at 13:22
  • @Swift I believe it was discussed in another thread that all Arabic here would be considered standardised to Classical, in the Quran as such latin numerals would only be suppored with latin characters not Arabic characters. We cna bring this discussion up again but to avoid dialect misundertandings we need to standardise the site to one or the other etc etc
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 13:40
  • @sammaye I am totally with the fact to allow only standard Arabic, and no need to open this discussion again, but my point is that both 123 or ١٢٣ are standard Arabic,
    – Swift
    Apr 27, 2015 at 13:51
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    @Swift indeed they are irl but on the internet, in CSS and unicode, they are not. That is where it matters; on here. This topic may apply to more characters as well. But I think the imporant thing is that we gotta consider this in the context of computers since we ar working on that medium and unfortunately SE does not have a good rtl platform so we can use Arabic-latin derivates with Arabic script.
    – Sammaye
    Apr 27, 2015 at 14:04
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There is some testing with ways of writing RTL (right-to-left) text in Meta-SE

It appears to exist a character in Unicode that overrides the default setting and converts the text to RTL

However HTML tags have an optional attribute named dir to specify the direction of text to RTL, LTR or auto (based on characters themselves). It does not appear in the list of allowed html tags and attributes I have found, but it can't be hard to add it as well, could be proposed in meta?

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