Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Juan M Torres -
Number of replies: 7

Hello there!

I have been working on the correct set up of a course for Arabic 101. Currently there are 5 professors form the University creating all the content for the course. The problems or inconvenient they have encountered are the following:

First one is that when they write in Arabic the indentation is left to write (LTR) and not Right to Left (RTL) now they would like this to be automatic and not have to change the indentation manually (we are not going to change the language of the course to Arabic since it is directed to people that have little or no knowledge of Arabic).

At the language department we have set as a rule that the professors collaborating in this course must write all their text in Microsoft Word before they paste it in to Moodle. We have done this because many Arabic speakers use other programs that use special fonts or encodings and will work only on their PCs. This rule has been working fairly well, but in many cases some diacritical marks are stripped away and the spacing is incorrect (may be the Arabic extension was not working?). I think this might have something to do with how Moodle stores this text in the DB (MySQL) and/or how it displays it; does Moodle saves all text as Unicode? Any fix, update or patch for this?

V 1.6.1

IE 6.0 / Mozilla Firefox in Windows XP Pro/ Mac OS X (Only Mozilla)/ Windows Vista Bus.

Server: Mac OS X/xampp Apache 2.2.4

MySQL 5.0.15

PHP 4.4.1

Thank you

Juan Manuel Torres

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In reply to Juan M Torres

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by koen roggemans -
Core developers को तस्बिर Documentation writers को तस्बिर Moodle HQ को तस्बिर Particularly helpful Moodlers को तस्बिर Plugin developers को तस्बिर Translators को तस्बिर
From Moodle 1.6 upwards, all data is stored in UTF8.
Not sure about the use of Microsoft Word for RTL languages, but from my experience it is a bad idea to paste text from Word in the editor, and apparently a developer found that too, since the Clean Word html button exists in the editor big grin. Some characters Word produces don't display nice (like the curly ", a little shorter then normal -, the ... who are contracted in one symbol ...).
It might be a good idea to search for an editor that supports UTF-8 properly to make your texts if that appears to be the problem with MS Word.
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In reply to koen roggemans

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Mohammad Jahama -
Pasting from Word in the editor is not the only cause, the spacing problem with Arabic diacritics remains even if you type the text using the standard HTML Moodle editor and also the FCK and Tinymce editors.

inside the editor: the text is shifted to the left
2003449095425556724_rs.jpg

Inside Moodle (after you click 'Save changes'): the text is also shifted to the left
2003481431006068872_rs.jpg

I've been searching this weekend, in an attempt to solve this problem, for a UTF-8 editor but couldn't find one. I need the zip file with the installation steps.

I'd be so grateful for a quick response, cuz I'm in the middle of designing an Arabic course.
Cheers.
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In reply to Mohammad Jahama

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Sativa Huang -

If you install Moodle using Fantastico, the encoding is Latin1, not UTF-8. Here is the topic regarding this issue.

It seems the encoding is not your main issue as you can display Arabic characters normally, without ??? smile. Personally, I do agree if your problem  caused by using Word which contains a lot of coding. May I suggest you to try the "clean" editor that support UTF-8, that is Notepad inside Windows or Notepad2 (freeware).

Another potential issue is the Arabic font inside moodle/lang/(...). In our webiste that dispalying simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese characters, the traditional one looks nicer than simplified. In fact, there is a traditional Chinese font inside that (...) but none for simplified Chinese. Of course, this is only a guess. I will try to find it out.

Hope you can overcome your problem soon, Good Luck!

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In reply to Sativa Huang

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Mohammad Jahama -

Hello Sativa,

After doing a small reseach, I found that the problem lies in Firefox cuz it works fine with IE (the text shown in the above image is not shifted to the left at all).
Unfortunately, I have to use FIrefox, so I need to fix that. I tried to Google it but couldnt figure it out. Maybe certain add-on or plugin could solve the problem.

Iam using Firefox 2.0.0.6 running under Windows XP.

Any ideas??
Thanks alot smile

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In reply to Mohammad Jahama

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Sativa Huang -

Hi,
At least you have known what is the reason. Yap, I have ever seen some webpage didn't display correctly in IE but in Firefox OK. If Firefox is not the one you should use, you may try Opera, but if Firefox is the only one, I personally think it is too difficult to solve it, perhaps you have to consider of using IE big grin.

I have figured out the deafult.ttf font (moodle/lang/zh_tw_utf8/font/default.ttf) has no effect on Chinese displaying in Moodle. Don't know why should it be there, although it is 13mb! Any ideas?

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In reply to Sativa Huang

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by koen roggemans -
Core developers को तस्बिर Documentation writers को तस्बिर Moodle HQ को तस्बिर Particularly helpful Moodlers को तस्बिर Plugin developers को तस्बिर Translators को तस्बिर
It is there to be used in graphs generated by Moodle (survey, logs etc)
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In reply to Mohammad Jahama

Re: Arabic RTL Indentation and Unicode setup problem

by Sativa Huang -

If possible, try to use other themes and see if it may solve your problem. smile

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