Right to Left languages and layout mirroring

In addition to supporting Unicode, Crystal Translator also handles right to left languages (RTL) such as Arabs and Hebrew languages:

• RTL display of source and translated text in the grid editor and multi-line editor
• RTL input of translated text in the grid editor and multi-line editor
• Layout mirroring of the source report if source and target language reading direction are different
• XLS export/import of RTL text

RTL support in Crystal Translator is in most cases done automatically and therefore transparent. However, this can be manually adjusted as indicated below:

Translation Memory (TM) settings:

When adding a new language, you can specify its reading order. This applies to both source and target languages. By default Crystal Translator will automatically set the reading order to the new languages you select. If however this is incorrect or you upgraded from a previous version that did not support RTL, then you will have to set this setting manually:

Tick the RTL checkbox if the language reading order is right to left such as Arabs and Hebrew. For left to right languages such as Western European languages, keep this checkbox unchecked.

When opening the target window, Crystal Translator will use this setting to set the reading order of the source text, the reading and input order of the target text and decide if layout mirroring is necessary.

Reading and input order:

The reading and input order can be changed manually from the Edit menu as shown below:

The grid editor and multi-line editor will immediately apply these settings:

You can also set the input order of an individual property during the translation by right clicking on the text. Please note that this setting only last while the text is being edited:

Also if using the XLS export, the appropriate Ms-Excel cells will be marked as RTL so that the translator can input immediately such languages into Ms-Excel.

Layout mirroring:

This function flips the report horizontally to support right to left languages:

• changing the position of every visual component of the report
• changing the alignment of text, but not of data field number
• switching the indentation of text
• flipping the right and left borders of boxes
• changing position of graph legends
• flipping the left and right report margins
   

Please note that after the mirroring:

• the left property is also inverted. When changing the position of a control that has been mirrored from the grid editor, the left property value refer to the right hand side of the report.
• reading order of text object in Crystal Reports cannot be set from the API so justified alignment is transformed into a right alignment
• pictures are not flipped, their positions are but not the image itself. This is because text may appear in the picture and some pictures lose their meaning if flipped.

This function is usually automatically applied, but you can also manually launch it from the Edit menu:

Correcting reading order of tags:

If you inputted Arabs or Hebrew text using a previous version of Crystal Translator that did not support RTL or imported an Ms-Excel file that was not produced with RTL support, you may have some "broken" tags in text properties, for instance:

This can be corrected using the menu Edit\Fix reading order for tags in Text properties