Right-to-Left Workskin

[samjohnsson]

One of the Support requests we've had a couple times recently is true r-t-l support for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. While we're looking for easier ways to do it, we've currently got a workaround that you can use on any text-based work you post.

To make yourself a workskin:
1) Log in.
2) Go here: archiveofourown.org/skins/new (you can reach that link by going to your Home, then clicking Skins, then the ‘New Skin’ button).
3) Change the Type to ‘Work Skin’ (this step is very important).
4) Write in a title you will recognize and a description.
5) Copy and paste the following into the CSS box:

#workskin #chapters .userstuff .rtl {
font-family: "Guttman David", Arial;
unicode-bidi: embed;
direction: rtl;
}

Then make sure you select the skin when posting a work in a rtl language, in the ‘Custom Stylesheet’ dropdown, and use
<div class="rtl">TEXT</div>
around your text (you can change “rtl” to anything, as long as you change it in both places: your skin and your text).

The skin should:
* set the directionality for the document to RTL
* replace the font with Guttman David, and fall back to Arial if the reader doesn't have GD. (Chosen for the example as it's one of the more consistent Hebrew fonts, according to our respondents.) Watch out that you don't get "smart" quotes around the font names.

If you have any questions, leave them here or give us a shout at the Support page!

Comments

[samjohnsson]

So I poked the Front End lead, and they gave me one better: a pull request that will add the dir="rtl" property to the parser, and to add an RTL button to the Rich Text Editor. I'm not sure when exactly it will get pulled, tested, and released, but it's coming.

[zaluzianskya]

Oh, nice.

I don't know any RTL languages, but this is cool.

[samjohnsson]

The big two off the top of my head are Hebrew and Arabic.

[zaluzianskya]

Ah, I just meant I didn't speak or write any. Bad phrasing!