GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 612940
Please mirror window titles when using a right-to-left language locale
Last modified: 2014-08-20 00:49:59 UTC
Hi, Some of metacity's themes align the window title to the left. For languages that are written from right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, this looks awkward (as if an English title would be aligned to the right). Usually in gtk, changing the locale to an RTL language locale automatically causes the user interface to be mirrored, and it would be nice if this would also work for metacity's window titles.
Created attachment 156223 [details] [review] Flip the title alignment when using an RTL language Hi again, I think I worked out a patch to handle this issue. I've attached it below. It recalculates the x offset of the title in the META_DRAW_TITLE case of meta_draw_op_draw_with_env function. I've used a version of metacity from launchpad for some reason, so I'm not sure if the patch will work on trunk. I'll test that tomorrow perhaps.
Review of attachment 156223 [details] [review]: This seems generally sane, except that there should be a space after "gtk_widget_get_direction". But can you tell me how I should test it? I've tried running zenity --info --text שלום --title שלום but it doesn't trigger the gtk_widget_get_direction() check. Do I have to switch locales entirely, or something?
Yes, the gtk_wdiget_get_direction result is determined by the locale (of metacity). You can test it by switching metacity's locale, or by switching the locale for metacity-theme-viewer. Sorry about the space. Do I need to upload a fixed patch?
Created attachment 161093 [details] Effect of this patch on Crux No, it's okay, I can do that for you at this end. This patch works fine *if* the design of the titlebar is entirely symmetrical except for the justification of the text. If you have any sort of asymmetrical design on the titlebar, the results are a bit confusing, as shown in the attached screenshot. I'm not really sure what to do about this.
This is a difficult problem. I haven't thought about it before. I'm not sure what to do here either. First, I think that the best end result would be to have Crux's left and right sections of the title replaced, and its middle part (the image with the little boxes) mirrored. I don't think however that this can be done automatically, because sometimes the graphics mirroring doesn't work. Perhaps a solution would be to add another attribute to the window tag in the theme, having a different frame style set for right-to-left locales. Something like: <window type="..." dir="rtl" style_set="..."/> Then the different style sets could have the alignment changed for the current locale. For symmetric titlebars as you said, such modifications aren't needed, so I think they should need minimal changes to work in RTL locales - this is why I've sent this patch. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to break current themes like Crux. Perhaps the patch for symmetric titlebars can be enabled somehow only for themes that choose it.