Issue 99382

I believe that the text direction of the note should inherit from the page's
text direction (b), but not from the direction of the text which the note is
annotating (a).
Here's a patch which sets the note's text direction based on the page direction.

Created attachment 62405 [details]
Sets note's text direction and alignment based on default page text dirextion

is that really what we want? what if the page is LTR, but the paragraph is RTL.
If I insert a note there, it sure should be RTL as well.

To clarify, this is not about which side the note appears, but the text inside a
note


adding christophnoack(ux), any comment on this?

mod->ayaniger: as you can see on the target, I was planning to work on this
later on, don't really have time right now, so give me some time to have a look
at it.

->yba:

Do you think margin notes should default to the page text direction or paragraph
text direction? 

that was just an example, there is of course also direction of the text at the
point that the postit is anchored to. As this would take all three hierarchies
into account, this is probably the way to go

Hi there!

I think this is still caused by not knowing what kind of language is desired in
all the notes. From my point of view, people chose the text direction on the
collaboration partners.

Scenario 1, no collaboration: A user writes a text in his mother language and
adds notes using the same language.

Scenario 2, publish text in foreign language: A user writes a text in a foreign
language. For his notes instead, he uses his mother language because he is much
faster in writing. Before the document gets published, all notes are removed /
unshown.

Thus, the notes content may be independent from the document itself (this not
only applies to the text direction, but also to the language itself). So - from
my point of view - there is no need to guess the direction from the text which
is currently written.

Proposal. As planned, the notes should get an own paragraph style.

Result:
- The position of the Note Anchor Area (Sidebar) is retrieved from either the
layout of the page's text direction or the page view mode (e.g. faced pages)
- The text direction is retrieved from the paragraph style, which usually
inherits from paragraph style "Standard" which itself inherits the settings from
the page style (the dialog says "use superordinate object settings")
- The text direction might be manually changed for a certain note (handled like
the document text)

@mod: This would solve your examples a) and b). With regard to my examples,
example 2 is easy - just change the paragraph style. Example 1 is no problem at all.

I think that would be a consistent solution which works for all kinds of
documents. Hopefully :-)

Consider Scenario 3:
A scholar is writing an article in English about a Hebrew work. say the Bible.
There are quotes from the Bible in Hebrew. The notes will likely in English.

Result:
The text direction is retrieved from the page style.

This is a very frequent occurrence in mixed Hebrew/English documents, and I
would imagine in mixed Arabic/English documents as well.

@ayaniger: No problem :-) Changing the Notes text style to "English" (LTR) is
sufficient, because the text direction isn't inherited from the page style any
more. The advantage is, that the text style provides a central setting for all
the notes in the document.

The document template creators may consider that and pre-define the text style
accordingly. Thus, this setting is document dependent - not system dependent.

mod->christophnoack: sounds good to me, thanks.

But as we do not have own paragraph styles for 3.2, we need a different solution
now. So would it be better to have it inherit from anchor text direction or
frame direction?

(if we guessed the direction wrong, you can still easily change it by shortcut
or toolbar)


mod->ayaniger: no matter what we decide, your patch doesn't look right, but I
could be wrong. Looks like you just take the first page style

- this does not need to be assigned to the current page at all
- does not take inserted frames into account, which could have a different
direction than the page

But I guess cmc posted all the possibilities on the mailing list, so once we
have decided on something, I'll code it up from 3.2

no difference between feature freeze and code freeze for this release. As none
of them are showstoppers, shifting all left over issues to 3.3

*** Issue 111575 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

I agree with christophnoack that the notes' directionality should be per-user,
not per-page or per-paragraph. No matter if I'm writing a paper in English or
Hebrew, my notes are in my mother tongue, even in collaborated documents.

Alternatively, could OOo not determine LTR or RTL based on the first
directionally-strong character in the note? I am familiar with other software
that do this, and it is great as natural sentences in either language usually do
not have a foreign word as the first word. Even those that do, can be easily
reworded or the user can manually switch directionality.

Will this bug be fixed in 3.3 final ?

the window for 3.3 is already closed, so this will go into 3.4

@mod: Thanks. Please update the bug target.

Since some time there isn't any progress in notes-feature. Therefore I change
this issue to OOo 3.x. Please set the target accordingly, when the development
in this area starts again.

Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".