[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="fr33domlover"
 ip="194.90.37.82"
 subject="comment 8"
 date="2014-09-20T12:50:13Z"
 content="""
> I don't think \"I know I am switching between English and Arabic, but I don't know which one I'm currently writing\" is a major use-case

Sure you need to know, but there's a difference between \"make the whole text RTL\" or \"make the LTR text RTL and make the RTL text LTR\".
It depends on what the user means.

> It sounds as though the po plugin is not really what you want, and you'd be better off with being able to write \[[!meta lang=ar dir=rtl]] or something.

Yes, that would help. But I'd need the PO plugin to respect this lang tag. Is this already possible?

> Could you test whether your tip works with <div dir=\"rtl\"> or something, please?

I did and it works, but there's an issue: In both ways - my CSS and the dir attribute - some things don't work right, for example, right-aligned floating
boxes need to be made left-aligned. How do I handle this with dir? I don't know CSS, but I think it may be possible to define CSS for various page
elements differently when in the \".rtl\" class - am I right? Another problem is that the horizontal bars of polls (poll plugin) still go LTR. Is there a way
to fix these things without CSS class? With the notebox template, the right-alignment uses CSS so if we want to use 'dir' it needs to be changed
to something non-CSS with correct semantics. Maybe if you could set dir to \"flip\" instead of \"rtl\" and \"ltr\", to mean \"the direction opposite to the
page's direction\". And that new 'dir' would also need to control alignment, since right now notebox is not affected by the dir like I said. The text inside
does become RTL but the box is still on the right like in LTR.

I don't see other issues but there are plugins I didn't try, e.g. does the box generated by pagetstats directive align to the left in RTL?

If CSS isn't needed for this I'll update the tip, otherwise I should probably fix these issues (notebox-rtl and poll) and add this to the CSS in
the tip, until there is a better solution (and even then, people will be running previous ikiwiki versions without the solution).
"""]]
