One of the problems, which users of RTL, CTL and/or CJK face with LibreOffice, is the lack of awareness of the need to enable full support for RTL/CTL and/or for CJK, via the preferences dialog. That is meta-bug 164250. One possible amelioration of this situation, after installation and during use, is to prompt the user about this possibility, at an opportune time. Specifically, suppose that we have not decided that RTL-CTL or CJK needs to be fully enabled, on installation. But now, the user starts editing content in an RTL-CTL or CJK language. When we notice this is happening (or happening repeatedly), we could bring up a dialog bog, or even just an info bar, with such a suggestion. The last paragraph was phrased a big vaguely since there's a lot of room for specifics and for bikeshedding here: * What constitutes "editing": Is it typing text? Is it opening a document in non-read-only mode, which has RTL-CTL / CJK content? Is it having the cursor on that content? Selecting, deleting, copying it but without typing? Pasting RTL content from elsewhere? * Dialog box, info bar, corner indication or something else? Note this means a choice of how "strong" the interruption is vs how easy it is to ignore/dismiss. * When exactly to bring up the UI element? The first time such editing occurs? When the document with such edited content is saved? When a document already edited is opened for the second time? etc.
We discussed the topic at the design meeting. A new installation/user wont know about Tools > Options > Languages > CTL/CJK and miss some support for their language. The minimum necessary setting is changing the locale, which affects the CTL/CJK option below. Some possible solutions come in mind: * Show a "Welcome Screen" on first startup with appropriate info and choices (bug 54593) * enable CTL/CJK by default (and let Western user disable it) * some heuristics during the installation to switch the option on / change the locale * pop-up an infobar at the first time when RTL content is inserted * tip of the day (bug 125257) * implement a guided tour (bug 164725) Personally I'd prefer the infobar.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > * Show a "Welcome Screen" on first startup with appropriate info and choices bug 154593 and bug 137931
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > We discussed the topic at the design meeting. I think you may have meant to post this on the meta bug, copying it there.
For the "what to show when an instance without CTL/Asian support decides to notify the user opening/editing relevant documents": I'd suggest to stick to the infobar. It's basically similar situation as missing hyphenation, or unupdated links.
(In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #4) Consistency is a good argument, for sure. But if it is just an infobar, we have to take care to make it very convincing, i.e. make it so that the user is likely to enable the full support rather than just dismiss it as "oh, an annoying infobar, go away". Specifically - perhaps we could arrange it so that the default action - even on clicking a dismissal - is enabling full RTL support, and that clicking some button brings up the Options dialog where the user can uncheck it.
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #5) Disagree with any aggressive persuasion of this kind. If needed, make sure that is will be shown again when a similar situation arises; and that disabling its appearance completely (if possible) is not the default action.
(In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #6) Were you not in favor of just enabling full support by default? Anyway, I can live with that as well, I suppose. It's a matter of the statistics of how many people will fail to "do the right thing" from among those users who would benefit from the full support enabled.
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #7) > Were you not in favor of just enabling full support by default? That is orthogonal. I totally support full support by default (and prefer even not have a "disable some support" option); but as long as that's not the case, I don't like questions with unexpected side effects (like "I decide to dismiss, and suddenly, it tells me it's smarter than I am").