Guy Rutenberg

It’s been a bit more than three years since I’ve written about a workaround for getting hyperref to play (almost) nicely with Hebrew. Over the past few weeks, I saw I rising interest in this and few people contacted me regarding this issue. So I thought it’s a good opportunity to better document the current situation, and possible ways that should be further investigated which I believe might lead to better solutions.
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It has been three years since I’ve released the original version of cssrtl.py (and two since it’s re-release). The old version did a nice job, but experience gained during that time led me to write from scratch a new version. I’ve detailed more than a month ago, the basic principles and ideas that guided me to design a better tool to help adapting CSS files from left-to-right to right-to-left.

The guidelines weren’t just empty words, they were written while working on the Hebrew adaptation to the Fusion theme and in the same time writing a new proof-of-concept version of cssrtl.py. The original intent was to release a more mature version of that code when it will be completed. However, due to the apparent shortage of time in the present and foreseeable future, I can’t see myself complete the project any time soon. So following the “release early” mantra, I’ve decided to release the code as-is. As I said, the code is in working state, but not polished, so it may be of benefit but may contain bugs. If you find any bugs or have any suggestions, I would be glad to hear.
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I’ve ported the Fusion theme by digitalnature to RTL, and adapted it to Hebrew.

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I’ve been using TiddlyWiki for a while now, and it became a very useful tool for me. Today, I’ve decided to organize my various recipes (somehow cooking and especially making deserts has turned into an hobby of mine), and as you can expect I’ve decided to use TiddlyWiki for the tasks.

There was a slight problem as some of the recipes are in Hebrew, and it seems TiddlyWiki doesn’t have built-in support for RTL (right-to-left) tiddlers. However, such support can be added via custom stylesheets and the tiddlers’ tags. The idea for this method is taken from this TiddlyWiki.

Create a new tiddler called “StyleSheet” (without the quotes). This is a special tiddler (a shadow tiddler) that lets you add additional CSS code for your wiki. Insert the following code into the newly created tiddler:

/*{{{*/
div[tags~="RTL"].tiddler {
    direction: rtl;
}
div[tags~="RTL"].tiddler .subtitle {
    direction: ltr;
}
div[tags~="RTL"].tiddler .tagged {
    direction: ltr;
    float: left;
}
/*}}}*/

Now for every tiddler you want to be in RTL direction just add RTL to its list of tags. After you do it, the tiddler will appear correctly. Here is an example of what in RTL looks like after the fix:

A screenshot of an RTL tiddler

On Monday, I’ve submitted a patch to the LyX developers mailing list with a fix for the numbering direction in Hebrew text. In Hebrew text the dot appeared before the numbering symbol instead of after it as it should.

This behaviour has been this way for years (at least as long as I can remember).
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This is a re-release of a script of mine that helps convert CSS layouts to RTL. I originally released it about a year ago but it was lost when I moved to the new blog. The script, cssrtl.py, utilizes a bunch of regular expressions to translate a given CSS layout to RTL.

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