[KitFox]

Hello,

As a very satisfied user of current and past XBMCs, I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest two features to the new Kodi:

1. A setting that will allow the alignment of EPG content to the right. That's because I come from a country where people write from right to left. The current left alignment makes it a bit hard to read in the local language... Lots of other countries also read and write from right to left.

2. Bigger and bold settings for fonts, at-least in the default skin, are a must! The whole experience is different for people with less than perfect eye-sight...

Hope this reaches the right places . Cheers!

[dhead]

I don't remember that there was an EPG specific issue with RTL, but nowadays I'm not a big PVR user.
Can you please elaborate and attach screenshots that example the issue.

In general XBMC got an alignment "issue" with RTL as the whole GUI is align to the left so unless XBMC will be able to mirror the GUI (as Google did in Android KitKat, some users will not love it) the solution must be a dedicated RTL skin.

[KitFox]

Hi and thanks for the reply, I'll do my best to add a screenshot ASAP.

At the meantime, sorry if I mess up things and over elaborate... but I can give you an example of what I mean below (think of it as some RTL language instead of English), this is the EPG program description (Ignore the "---", they are instead of space) and it is how it would be if the problem occurred in English and would be the opposite of what I described above - alignment to the right instead of to the left:


The wrong way it shows:

----------!I am writing about what? About stuff

How it should show:

I am writing about what? About stuff!----------

There are two functions that are in need to be added:

1. Alignment of the text either to the right or left.
2. Alignment of special characters, in order, either to the right or left.


Don't know if this helps... just a few examples from different 'worlds' than Kodi:

By my experience in the Windows environment, you need to actually change both text and special characters order (or whatever they call it)... I have no idea why. You do it using Ctrl+Shift and Alt+Shift - left keyboard - text\special characters aligns to the left, right keyboard aligns to the right (you need another language installed for that to function, naturally).

Thunderbird solved the same problem in their GUI with a simple add-on (there's a screenshot of how it looks like): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunder...src=search

* I will only add that I'm talking only about the EPG, not the entire skin. I use English menus, but the EPG isn't in English and I have no control over it...

[dhead]

@KitFox

Now this is a more clear description.

I think that this might be a bug in XBMC, I'm not a developer but I believe this might not be related to the GUI.
XBMC using fribidi for everything related to BiDi (bidirectional text) and from what I understand the fault might be in one of the parameters that can be set with fribidi: "base direction" that maybe is forced as LTR instead of auto recognized by "strong character".

See fribidi manpage (although XBMC use libfribidi) http://www.unix.com/man-page/linux/1/fribidi/

And maybe the related code is in CharsetConverter.cpp, notice that there's no FRIBIDI_TYPE_RTL, only FRIBIDI_TYPE_LTR
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...verter.cpp

Edit:
Forgot to mention that from what I know there's a difference between the alignment of the text (which is to the left in a text box, in Gotham not sure of Helix) to the base direction (this is why signs are in the wrong place) and to the direction/order of letters in a string.

[dhead]

p.s.

I will look at this thoroughly myself next week so if you not sure about opening a bug report don't worry.

[KitFox]

@dhead

Thanks a lot =D .

Don't know if this helps, but I have two screenshots with text bubbles to show even more:

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f19/ki...e0d7bc.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f19/ki...855a15.jpg

Please ask me for anything else should you need.

[KitFox]

I've made a tiny (though probably insignificant) change to one of the screenshots. So here are the updated ones -

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f19/ki...b49dd6.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f19/ki...d69ae3.jpg

[dhead]

I would say that the main issue is that the text isn't align to the right.

The most probable solution would be to have XBMC find a "strong" string or character and to align the line by it.
It isn't the best solution as it's possible that RTL text will start with a Latin word/s (for example music artist info) but it's good enough.
Probably XBMC would still have to send fribidi the base direction (based of the line alignment it found) but an actual dev would know about this better than I.

Forget about changing the direction of the bar and locations of text boxes, these would need to wait to a RTL GUI solution (if it would an auto GUI mirror or dedicated mode+skin).

[KitFox]

The direction of the bar and location of the text boxes aren't that important to be frank, as long as the text is aligned to the right. Do you think a bug report is needed here?

[dhead]

Yes, definitely.
(there isn't related bug reported)

But first we need to confirm this exist also in Helix (there're alpha and nightly builds available).

I can't yet test this myself as I'm away from my machines.

[KitFox]

I just tested it on Helix alpha 2 and the problem persists. I'll try and open a bug report.

[KitFox]

@dhead - Thanks a lot .

I posted a bug report here: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/15400

Unless there's anything else to be added, I guess this concludes the matter here.

[dhead]

Great.

One correction: this is a generic issue in XBMC, not restricted to EPG alone.