Please implement RTL back!

more than 400 million people around the world use a language that is Right-To-Left. please offer them an outliner with RTL support. maybe you could move it up the priority list?
I myself will move to dynalist from workflowy tomorrow if it had RTL support.
every word processing software out there has this feature, it would be so important to have.

2 Likes

Previously very basic RTL support was added, but then we received complaints that it was worse than having no support at all, since the bullet points and checkboxes are still on the left side of the item and it looked terrible. This is the background for removing the very basic RTL support we had.

We plan to bring it back with better RTL support, thanks for the suggestion.

1 Like

Erica, thank you for the reply.

I understand and appreciate you being attentive to both the needs of RTL users, and to the quality of solutions you want to offer.

I guess I’m looking to know if it’s on the practical agenda and roadmap, or it is in the “to do sometime in the unknown future”.
I’m waiting for one savior outliner that would offer this - and then I can move my personal data, my organisation’s data, and my community management and documentation to there.

I want to offer you this:
I’m guessing that as a business you want to have an edge over competition - and already you have so many more features than any other outliner - I think.
It seems to me that the potential to tap into 5% of the world population is significant - and involves not too much work.
Did you check the number of RTL users you have? And the number that could be drawn to you if you had RTL support?

Maybe you could start with adding the feature without auto-detection? instead users could choose to turn it on or off for them. then - you can have a not-perfect RTL that is valuable for some to have, and in the meanwhile fix the bullet point and checkboxes.

Please tell me there has been some developments/progress on this!

Hi @Mohamed_Bin_Abdilwal: we have been doing more research on this. As we have learned, we should either do RTL properly or do no bother at all, so that’s what we’re going to do!

Please give us more time on this, as we’re a small team of 2 and neither of us is a native Arabic speaker, we’ll have to learn all the language conventions. Thanks for understanding!

1 Like

Thank you for the reply

Dynalist already perfectly supports Arabic and all aspects concerning its typography. The only issue is that it goes in the wrong direction. Even though I am not a coder, I doubt that this needs a native Arabic speaker to implement. Please correct me if I am wrong.

This was our initial implementation, which I assume is why this post is titled “Please implement RTL back” rather than just “Please implement RTL”.

After changing the text direction, all the other controls, including the bullets and checkboxes, are in the wrong position. To quote one user:

Hello Dynalist Team,
I love Dynalist and I can’t imagine my life without it, I have subscribed for a whole year since day one and I support you by any means possible.
below I provide a feedback of the last update to make Dynalist better.
I just updated Dynalist windows app, I have noticed after the update that the writing direction of the lists that’s written in Arabic has shifted from left to right, to right to left, this made the lists and the bullet points and the layout unorganized and hard to understand as the texts does not come after the bullet points or check boxes but in the opposite side.
(SEE Below or ATTACHMENT)
Inline image
suggested solutions:
1-Make the bullet points start from right to left according to the languages’ writing direction.
or
2- Revert to the old method where the text aligns and starts after the bullet points.

After that, we reverted the changes and realized we need to understand RTL much more before implementing something half-assed.

In fact, there are entire CSS automation solutions like cssjanus or cssflip for converting LTR CSS to RTL CSS. Apparently, there’s a lot more to it to make a website usable to RTL users than setting the direction to automatic, like we did last time.

I’m not saying that we need to hire an Arabic speaker to implement this, but at least we need to read all the resources we can find and observe a few Arabic websites before we can do anything, all while juggling other bug fixes and feature priorities (you can check out our development at our blog).

I hope that makes the long wait at least a little more understandable! Sorry again for still not supporting RTL.

Update: RTL layout is available now! You can now turn on this setting in Settings – Preferences – Appearance.

Note that RTL will not be applied to every corner of the app, since the user interface itself is still in English. We try to cover all the your content though, let me know if you find any issues!

2 Likes

Oh awesome! Thank you so much :slight_smile:

1 Like

I am absolutely thrilled. Thank you a ton for that. I have just checked it out on Mac and Android and so far so good.

Just one question though, any chance I can assign a keyboard shortcut for that? Since I work alot in both English and Arabic, would save me alot of clicks and ultimately time.

2 Likes

Now you can set RTL differently for each document. Does that help?

image

(Available on web and coming to desktop app soon)

1 Like

I was very excited to find out that Dynalist supports RTL.
AFAIK you’re the first writing tool of that style to do that properly (albeit there are some quirks here and there but overall this just works!).

However, I do have one request -
Shared notes are currently opened as LTR by default.
Since RTL/LTR is (or rather should be) inherent to the note itself and not to the viewer, is it possible to either open the note as it was created, or at the very least add an option to the sharing window (Just as it’s possible to mark a note’s theme, collapsed status and inline-images flag when sharing, make it possible to open the note in RTL mode).

And on that note - is there a place where one could share bugs or improvements to be made to the RTL support?

Thank you very much!
Oded.

1 Like