Bug 155078

Summary: Support text-direction being adaptive to the text content of each paragraph
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1>
Component: LibreOfficeAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: UNCONFIRMED ---    
Severity: enhancement CC: vsfoote
Priority: medium    
Version: Inherited From OOo   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 43808    

Description Eyal Rozenberg 2023-04-29 12:35:16 UTC 
In several applications/operating systems with multi-paragraph text fields, the direction of each paragraph (=line-break-separated stretch) of text is determined by the _contexts_ of that paragraph. Typically (but not always) the first strong-directionality character of the paragraph sets its direction.

This should be supported in LibreOffice - as another option in addition to LTR, RTL and "Use superordinate object dir". It allows users to avoid having to explicitly set directions back and forth when switching from one paragraph to the next. It would be particularly useful in Calc cells and single-paragraph Draw/Impress objects.

Also, I think MS Office has this, at least in Excel cells.
Comment 1 Mike Kaganski 2023-04-29 12:57:48 UTC 
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #0)
> Also, I think MS Office has this, at least in Excel cells.

Yes:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-alignment-of-text-in-a-cell-6426fdc3-e0da-41f9-bfe1-82f064a9696c#bkmk_rtl

So in this regard, it would be an interoperability issue.
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2023-04-29 13:25:41 UTC 
Reasonable, assume ICU libs would support it already in some fashion--at least the directionality. At minimal performance cost--edit engine(s) during user input only? RTL / LTR should then be retained in ODF, so not reparsing on import?