RTL-languages: Making icons RTL?

Hi,

The following bug-report puzzles me [1], is it desired to have some icons also
from RTL in RTL languages?

I just wanted to be sure -- before doing some work -- because so far I only
have the bug reporter's opinion and there are many RTL languages.

If it is desired the next step is to decide at what level (kdelibs, qt) the
transformation of the icons should happen, though I'd create a thread for this
on the kde-core-devel ml.

Cheers,
matthias

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211192

On Wednesday 11 November 2009 15:49:45 Matthias Fuchs wrote:
> The following bug-report puzzles me [1], is it desired to have some icons
>  also from RTL in RTL languages?
That is correct, some icons do not migrate well to RTL environments.
 
> I just wanted to be sure -- before doing some work -- because so far I only
> have the bug reporter's opinion and there are many RTL languages.
>
> If it is desired the next step is to decide at what level (kdelibs, qt) the
> transformation of the icons should happen, though I'd create a thread for
>  this on the kde-core-devel ml.
NEVER, and I mean NEVER, do this automatically. What if for some reason, the
RTL icon should not be an exact mirror of the LTR icon? One example I am
thinking of is an icon  of left arrow whit shadow from top-left. The RTL
version should be an arrow which points to the right, but still keeps the
shadow position.

Another option is the Queue icon on KMail. If we reverse the icon "as is", the
clock will point to another hour... Not something significant, but has to be
though  of.

One option, is that for RTL languages, when we load an action, we try to find
${ICON}_rtl and use it. However I see a huge performance penalty (much more
disk scrapping on application loading).  

> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211192
This is  the real problem: the UI uses the same concepts as as a cassette
(remember those?). We can see the same UI in media players. The problem is
that this UI should not be affected by the direction of the desktop (for
example backwards should be always on the left).

Zayed's suggestion is simple enough to work on this occasion. But we can also
think about elements which should always contain the same visual order (not
only logical).

On Wednesday 11 November 2009 22:16:11 Diego Iastrubni wrote:

> On Wednesday 11 November 2009 15:49:45 Matthias Fuchs wrote:
> > The following bug-report puzzles me [1], is it desired to have some icons
> >  also from RTL in RTL languages?
>
> That is correct, some icons do not migrate well to RTL environments.
>
> > I just wanted to be sure -- before doing some work -- because so far I
> > only have the bug reporter's opinion and there are many RTL languages.
> >
> > If it is desired the next step is to decide at what level (kdelibs, qt)
> > the transformation of the icons should happen, though I'd create a thread
> > for this on the kde-core-devel ml.
>
> NEVER, and I mean NEVER, do this automatically. What if for some reason,
>  the RTL icon should not be an exact mirror of the LTR icon? One example I
>  am thinking of is an icon  of left arrow whit shadow from top-left. The
>  RTL version should be an arrow which points to the right, but still keeps
>  the shadow position.

What I meant is that it should happen automatically for a set of icons the
artists/translators defined. Though as the bug reporter notes Gnome solved
that issue so we simply could look how they did it and see if there would be a
huge performance hit or not when doing it similarly.

In any way I don't think that every application writer should implement
something themselves, they simply should use the icons like they do right now
and everything else should happen automatically if needed.