GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 170081
arrows for next/prev page are inconsistant with right-to-left languages
Last modified: 2008-01-24 15:08:56 UTC
Books written in right-to-left languages also have their pages numbered in reverse order. Hence, the "next" page is intuitively to the LEFT. The left arrow in evince brings back the prev. page. This will be very confusing when reading right-to-left texts. Other information:
With rtl-friendly themes (e.g. the default gtk theme and all themes that don't change the arrow stock images) the next button arrow points to the left if you're using a locale where text is written from right to left. Is this not good enough?
Unfortunately, no. 1) Most people who read rtl languages *and* use the computer are at least bi-lingual. IMHO, people shouldn't be expected to change locale just to read a document. And what if a person needs to read 100 documents, half of them rtl? 2) it really not a "just works" approach 3) I checked, and it seems like the the next page arrow still points to the right in rtl locale. only now the arrows are facing each other. Maybe the arrows in evince should be pointing up and down, down for next? I guess the small scrolling buttons will have to be removed then, because they are the other way around.
I don't really want to change the Next/Previous, we've tried other combinations like Down/Up and I'm certain this is the best of those. A solution could be changing the locale of Evince based on the language in the document. I'm sure PDF has a way to figure this out (Martin?) but not sure if we can easily switch the GTK+ locale stuff during load of the document.
Martin what do you think?
martin: *poke* - can you please answer bryan's question so we can get some progress on this one to either confirm it or to close it as WONTFIX for example? thanks in advance.
Martin: ping...
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!
FWIW, Preview on Safari (OSX equivalent of Evince) uses up/down arrows rather than left/right arrows for its Previous/Next buttons. Seems to work fine there.
Actually, using up/down instead of left/right makes much more sense. The pages are displayed vertically anyway. If one of the maintainers agrees, I'll cook up and commit a patch.
Created attachment 102743 [details] [review] Change arrows from left/right to up/down
Could we please get this in or decide WONTFIX before 2.22?
2008-01-24 Wouter Bolsterlee <wbolster@svn.gnome.org> * shell/ev-window.c: Use top/up/bottom/down arrows instead of first/left/last/right in the toolbar and menu actions. This fixes issues with RTL languages and is visually consistent with the page view. Fixes bug #170081.
Disclaimer ;) 16:03:18 < clarkbw> oh yeah, uws, KaL. go for it