Issues using RoboHelp 2015 and WebHelp with Arabic translation

[ENTRGWH]

Hi

I'm currently updating an Arabic translation of the help for one of our products using RH 2015 (patched to date) on Windows 10. I should mention that this is legacy help which started as Microsoft HTML Help. I have two issues that I haven't been able to fix.

- I got the translated files and integrated them into the project, however, it seems as if any sentence (in both the new and the legacy files) that contains an English word is not correctly switched RTL. The sentence is switched correctly up to the English word and then the RTL formatting stops. The result is at best a confusing jumble and at times actually has the opposite meaning of the original sentence. Words that do not translate, such as the company name, appear in UI labels and need to appear in procedures.

- The second problem is with bullets and numbering. I have yet to find a way to make the bullets and numbers appear on the right rather than the left of a line. The original method used was to create a table and confine the bullet or number to the rightmost cell and place the text next to it on the left. This is clumsy and time consuming. There must be a way of doing this in the CSS or through the RH interface.

Advice appreciated!

[Peter Grainge]

On the first point that sounds like a bug. Try a new project with just one topic and see if you can replicate the issue there. If you can then perhaps contact Support but definitely log a bug. Please follow this link to report bugs and request features. The more people who do so, the higher it gets prioritised.

https://tracker.adobe.com

Post the link to that bug in this thread and others can vote for it.

My limited understanding of RTL is that whilst RoboHelp can generate RTL help, the Design Editor does not support RTL so the bullet issue might well involve continuing with tables unless Support can come up with anything. FrameMaker does support RTL editing. I don't know if that might help you.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[ENTRGWH]

I created a new Arabic project and tried importing a file--same issues. I then created a new topic and copied the text from a file in the original project--no luck. After that I tried copying the information to a file, saving it as text and then copying the text into a new topic--nope, that didn't work either.

I've tried experimenting with the various places where you can specify the language without success. I guess it must be bug.

Thanks for the quick reply, Peter! Appreciated as always.

[Peter Grainge]

It might be worth speaking to Support anyway. They might be able to get a fix. If not, then report it as a bug.

Just a wild thought. Could the English words be inserted as variables and would that fox the bug? (If I am not confusing the animal world.)

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[ENTRGWH]

- I tried to add the problem as a bug, however, for whatever reason I kept getting an error message when I tried to submit it. I double checked the required fields and made sure I was logged in.

- You can add the English word as a variable. I'm not too familiar with RoboHelp variables but so far it didn't seem to fix the issue. It seems like a promising idea so I'm going to continue looking into different ways of entering the English words.

- I discovered that you can fix the numbering, bulleting, etc. issue by encapsulating the procedure as a whole in the tags <blockquote dir="rtl"></blockquote> in the html. I hasten to add that, while this doesn't seem to break anything yet, use at your own risk. I haven't fully QA'd the help. This also reverses tables.