[R-SIG-Mac] Right to left languages support in R on mac

[Nguyen, Duc-Quang (swissinfo)]

Thank you for your answer.

Unfortunately, I cannot read any right-to-left languages besides the bug I mentioned. But I work in a multilingual environment (newsroom in 10 languages) with arabic journalists but no arabic programmer. I will try find reaching out for R programmers fluent in these languages.

I think however that this bug could be addressed even without any knowledge of a right-to-left language. From this simple example (http://rpubs.com/d-qn/170211), one could immediately see that the xlab text provided got inverted when plotted.

FYI, I have thrown texts in all kinds of non-latin alphabets (cyrillic, japanese, chinese, … ) and it works fine. Only right-to-left on mac seems broken when plotting (in base graphics, ggplot2, ...) but it is handled correctly otherwise (for instance assigning RTL text to a variable and then printing that variable in the console).



Duc-Quang Nguyen



On 12 Apr 2016, at 00:48, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com<mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>> wrote:

On 11/04/2016 12:45 PM, Nguyen, Duc-Quang (swissinfo) wrote:
Hello,

[I am resubmitting this issue because my previous email has its non-latin characters incorrectly displayed on r-sig-mac, which defeats the illustration of the bug...]

I am wondering if there is a way to support right-to-left languages (arabic, hebrew, …) in R on Mac? There is mac-only bug that messes up right-to-left languages in all graphics. This illustrated in this short RPubs: http://rpubs.com/d-qn/170211

None of the R Core developers are native speakers of languages that use right-to-left writing, and (I think) none of us can even read a bit of them.  So you're likely to have some difficulty with this request.

I'd suggest contacting someone on one of the translation teams (listed at http://developer.r-project.org/TranslationTeams.html), but I don't see any right to left languages there, so they may not be any more help.

This indicates to me that we have a need for expertise in this area.  Do you have experience programming with these languages, or do you have contacts with people who do?

Duncan Murdoch



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