The tabs dialog (e.g. Paragraph | Tabs on the menu) shows four kinds of tabs: Left, Right, Centered and Decimal. The "Left" and "Right" tabs are mis-named. When inserting a Left tab stop, in an LTR paragraph the tabbed text will be left-aligned; but in an RTL paragraph the text will be right-aligned. In other words: These are 'Start' and 'End' tab stops. LO doesn't currently support Left or Right tab stops. Please change the UI labels and the documentation accordingly. Note that this situation is the converse of what we have for paragraph alignment! There, Left and Right are what's actually implemented, but Start and End - aren't. I find that amusing somehow :-) Anyway, this is all further motivation for why bug 131192 needs to be worked on. We should have Left, Right, Start, End, Centered and Decimal as tab stop types.
Agreed. For the people ignorant of LTR/RTL duality I suggest to use "Start (Left)" and "End (Right)" resp. "Start (Right)" when the paragraph has RTL locale. Might be a bit tricky and just start/end are an improvement too. Code pointer: cui/uiconfig/ui/paratabspage.ui cui/source/tabpages/tabstpge.cxx and maybe class SvxFrameDirection
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > Agreed. For the people ignorant of LTR/RTL duality I suggest to use "Start > (Left)" and "End (Right)" resp. "Start (Right)" when the paragraph has RTL > locale. Might be a bit tricky Probably not that tricky, since they'll always see the same thing - such people dont typically work with RTL documents at all. Maybe you could even make the choice of labels depend on whether "complex scripts" are enabled or not; I think some RTL features depend on that. > and just start/end are an improvement too. Let's start with that then. > > Code pointer: > > cui/uiconfig/ui/paratabspage.ui > > cui/source/tabpages/tabstpge.cxx > and maybe class SvxFrameDirection I'll try and have a look this weekend maybe.
Akaki Dzidziguri committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/2da684d43bbc19763ebd22300904c20a99461464 tdf#147814 Tabs dialog: rename Left/Right to Start/End It will be available in 26.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Wait! We can't proceed with this patch. It turns out, that what we write aren't really Start and End tabs. We are actually using faux switching of tab directions, when switching paragraph direction. To see this, create a document with left tabs at 1, 2, 3 cm and right tabs at 4, 5, 6 cm. Then write an FODT. You'll get: <style:tab-stops> <style:tab-stop style:position="1cm"/> <style:tab-stop style:position="2cm"/> <style:tab-stop style:position="3cm"/> <style:tab-stop style:position="4.001cm" style:type="right"/> <style:tab-stop style:position="5.001cm" style:type="right"/> <style:tab-stop style:position="6.001cm" style:type="right"/> </style:tab-stops> forget about the inaccuracy. The point is that the left tabs - well, we don't know what they are, but the right tabs are actually right tabs. The same kind of switching occurs today, still, for paragraph text alignment, as a legacy from the (very recent) times when we didn't directly support Start and End. So, Akaki Dzidziguri, it would be more complicated than just switching labels. Moreover - there is also the matter of what happens when we are in tbrl or tblr writing mode, and how _that_ should be labeled.