[libreoffice-design] Re: Proposed design meeting discussion: Extrinsic vs intrinsic paragraph direction

Hi Eyal,

It might be useful to create a special manual for RTL users. I would be 
willing to collaborate on such a project. Once such a manual has been 
created, it would become clear whether anything is actually missing and 
where the user interface needs to be improved. I suspect that no 
fundamental changes are necessary, either to the ODF format or to its 
implementation in LibreOffice.

Kind regards,
Regina

Eyal Rozenberg schrieb am 30.09.2025 um 00:53:
> I propose we devote a time slot during one of our upcoming design 
> meetings (but not during the next two weeks, so we would have some 
> heads-up for more people to join perhaps) to discuss the issue of 
> direction as an intrinsic/intentional vs an extrinsic/extensional 
> property of paragraphs or of text more generally.
>
> This issue has come up recently in:
>
> Bug 168537: DF RTL followed by "Clear DF" retains RTLness, aligns left
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168537
>
> and has brought up the matter from:
>
> Bug 40496: "Clear Direct Formatting" clears RTL directionality
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40496
>
> with additional discussion found on
>
> Bug 58070: Switching paragraph styles removes explicit text direction 
> choice
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58070
>
> Briefly:
>
> One can often deduce the intended horizontal writing direction (i.e. LTR 
> vs RTL; I'm ignoring vertical text progression here) of a piece of text 
> from the content itself, without any formatting indication. And that 
> happens in many contexts, including text editors and viewers, UI text 
> edit controls, email clients etc.
>
> However - the direction is often not possible to determine "correctly", 
> as the text may be acceptable as either LTR or RTL, often depending on 
> wider context. Also, the "technical status quo" in ODF as a standard and 
> LibreOffice as an app is, that direction is an aspect of text 
> formatting, set explicitly (or inherited) and separately from the content.
>
> The discussion might map out some of the clashes of these two facts, and 
> consider what the right approach to settle or address them should be. As 
> we're talking about a design meeting, this will not focus on ODF, but 
> potential changes to it might stem from UI/UX suggestions. See, for 
> example,
>
> Bug 162120 - Auto-detect paragraph directions when they were not set 
> explicitly
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162120
>
> and my comment #13 there in particular.
>
> So, what say you?
>
> ---------------------------------
>
> PS - Let me clarify that this is _not_ the subject of making text 
> language be an aspect of content rather than formatting. The two 
> subjects are separate, and while they have some similarities, they are 
> also quite different.


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