<div dir="ltr">Can we go forward with the patch or anyone have more comments ? Kaplan <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Rafael Rocha Daud <<a href="mailto:rrdaud@gmail.com" target="_blank">rrdaud@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Hello, In short, I think the patch addresses the issue correctly, and should be applied as-is. Read on for detailed reasoning for this. Go to the last paragraph for an additional proposal (might be an easy-hack? -- I can't judge because none would be easy for me :-)). According to this page (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts</a>), there are two separate things: text direction, which is LTR or RTL (left-to-right and right-to-left), and text orientation, which is vertical or horizontal. The new patch treats the function as orientation changing, which it really is, so it should be applied. But there's something more to it, which relates to the language you're writing into. The thing is: all languages that use vertical orientation are read right-to-left. The main example is Chinese. That article also states that one-line (therefore horizontal) RTL are in fact special cases of vertical writing, in which the columns have only one row. This is used when there's small space to write into, for example, an horizontal sign above a temple entrance. So we could say RTL direction and vertical orientation are interchangeable and have the same meaning in practice. The patch treats orientation, so saying vertical suffices. But, many of these languages can also use horizontal, left-to-right writing. If you choose left-to-right in the dialog (or horizontal with the patch applied), that's what you get, even if you're writing in Chinese or Japanese. The behavior of the application is consistent in this, and lets the user choose what kind of writing he wants. The caveat is someone writing in these languages could choose "horizontal" and still expect to write right-to-left -- the special case of vertical writing mentioned above (say they haven't read the wikipedia article, what a shame). We could solve this by changing the "vertical" option to "vertical (right-to-left for eastern asian scripts)", but I'm not sure this is needed. We should also leave the horizontal option alone, for the reason that middle-east languages (mainly arab and hebrew) are written right-to-left, but horizontally. Plus, the cell properties doesn't change this, the font does. If the font is right-to-left, then the text will be written so, despite of what the dialog says (or it would become unreadable). So we say "vertical (RTL for eastern asian scripts)" and "horizontal", and let the font decide the direction. The dialog only takes care of orientation. But there's an additional issue. If the language you're writing into is LTR, then if you choose "vertical" in the dialog, what happens is that the text is rendered rotated 90 degrees to the right, so you have to incline your head in that direction to read it properly. That's cool, because you could use for example narrow columns and still write long words in them. I once used this for the headers of a table. So the current dialog is indeed incorrect, because it states "right-to-left" but English would still be written LTR. Same as "left-to-right", when Arab would still be written RTL (and couldn't be otherwise, because of the ligatures). My proposal is (apart from applying the patch): The dialog would offer 3 options: (1) horizontal, (2) vertical (eastern asian scripts), (3) vertical (other scripts). The first two would work just as today, including the behaviour of rotating to the right when using the second option with other than asian scripts. The change comes with the third option: instead of rotating to the right, the scripts would be rotated to the left. The reason is: there have been studies proving it's much easier to read if you rotate to the left. I point this page [<a href="http://www.arcoweb.com.br/design/mostra-design-brasileiro-em-milao-publico-italiano-ve-a-originalidade-do-design-brasileiro-avenida-paulista-14-02-2003.html" target="_blank">http://www.arcoweb.com.br/design/mostra-design-brasileiro-em-milao-publico-italiano-ve-a-originalidade-do-design-brasileiro-avenida-paulista-14-02-2003.html</a>] as an example. The lamp-posts in Paulista Av., São Paulo have been designed in the 1920's by modernist architects, and they discovered that rotating to the left makes the names of the streets more readable than when rotated to the right. This works so well that is has been like this for many decades now. And they're street signs! This third option would let us rotate the words this way, while maintaing the ability to rotate right using the second option. And since this would be a third option, there could be room to add the ability to choose the rotation degree: 45, 60 or 90. That would make it even more readable (but that would depend if the fonts could be rendered this way). Do you think it's desirable (in the feature side) or feasible (in the hacking side)? Well, either way, thanks Lior for the patch, IMHO it could be applied immediatly. Best regards./ Rafael PS.: the image attached shows the present behaviour I tried to describe. Em 31-10-2011 14:05, Jan Holesovsky <<a href="mailto:kendy@suse.cz" target="_blank">kendy@suse.cz</a>> escreveu: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Hi Lior, Thank you for the patch! It seems that it caused some misunderstanding, so maybe it might be good to CC: the UX guys for the suggestion of wording? - CC'd now. UX guys - please have a look at Lior's suggestion; for a screenshot of what he means, see his original mail in the ML archive: <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-October/019944.html" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-October/019944.html</a> mainly: <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0001.png" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0001.png</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0002.obj" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0002.obj</a> How does that sound? Thank you, Kendy </blockquote> </blockquote></div> </div>