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Troubles with punctuation direction in Hebrew and French posts

  1. noabenattar
    Member

    Hi, my blog is in Hebrew and French and I write posts in both languages.
    I am having troubles as I write French from left to right, and Hebrew from right to left: I am having troubles with the direction of the punctuation in hebrew, as if it was only made to be from left to right (the French direction)...
    Hope it is clear, and hope that you can maybe help me...
    Thanks a lot,
    Noa

    The blog I need help with is thesongoftheweek.wordpress.com.

  2. timethief
    Member

    I tagged this thread for Staff help. Please subscribe to it so you are notified when they respond.

  3. catrymer
    Staff

    Hi there,

    Thanks for reporting the problem. Because you can only assign one language to a blog, it's possible you will not be able to set this to work for both in a single blog. However, I have asked internally to see if there's a way to get this to work for you. Hold tight, and I will get back to you when I hear a definitive answer.

    Best!

  4. noabenattar
    Member

    Thanks a lot for your help :)

  5. yt09
    Member

    I'm curious about the staff response!

    This might help if you're familiar with HTML. The HTML lang tag can be used to set different languages. For example, if the blog setting is English, but a paragraph needs to be in French, the HTML tag would be <p lang="fr">. In the case of Hebrew, I believe the tag would be <p lang="he" dir="rtl">. The dir tag sets the direction of the text to right to left.

  6. catrymer
    Staff

    Hi there,

    One of our staff members who reads Hebrew took a look at your site and said he didn't see problems with the Hebrew punctuation other than a change from straight quotes to curly quotes. Is that the problem you were seeing? If not, do you have an example post that shows the issue with the direction of the punctuation?

    Thanks!

  7. noabenattar
    Member

    Hi, thank you both for your answers :)
    Actually I'm not familiar with HTML but I'll try to find somebody who is...
    Catryner, actually this is not about straight or curly quotes, if you look at this post, you will see that in the hebrew part, I didn't put full stops at the end of some sentences because they wouldn't be at the end of the sentence as they should be, instead they go to the beginning (it may be hard to understand when you don't read hebrew...):
    For example the first paragraph:

    קשה לנו להיכשל. קשה לנו להיפסל. ולפעמים עוד יותר קשה לשמוע אחרי זה משפטים כמו “לא לדאוג, הכל לטובה”, כי באותו הרגע אין לנו את התמונה המלאה ואנחנו לא באמת מאמינים שזה ככה.

    http://thesongoftheweek.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/im-just-a-cosmic-girl-looking-for-a-space-cowboy/

  8. catrymer
    Staff

    Hi,

    I see what you mean. Let me check back in with our experts and see what they say.

    Thanks!

  9. noabenattar
    Member

    Thanks to you for your help :)

  10. catrymer
    Staff

    Hi there,

    Thanks for your patience. It looks like the problem is related to what I said originally, the default directionality is set by your blog's language settings. You can override this by using a language that has an alternate setting, as you do when you add Hebrew to your French language blog, but it only pushes punctuation to the other side when you have a Hebrew character after the punctuation.

    The fastest and easiest way to work around this limitation is to add a Hebrew character after your last full stop and then change the color of that character to white so it is invisible. That will push the punctuation where you want it to be.

    Let me know if that doesn't work for you.

    Best!

  11. noabenattar
    Member

    Hey Catrymer,
    Thanks a lot for the tip, didn't think about it and it's a good one!
    Happy to know that my hebrew texts are going to look normal now :)
    Thanks again :)

  12. noabenattar
    Member

    Ok so this is going to be a silly one: I can't see where I change the color of the font (I have italic, bold and other stuff but I don't see the font color...)

  13. catrymer
    Staff

    Hi there,

    Not silly at all! There are two rows of buttons, but initially you only see the top row and the option to change the font color is in the bottom row. You can see the second row of buttons by clicking on the "kitchen sink" button in the first row; this is the last button on the far right.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/

    Best!

  14. noabenattar
    Member

    Thanks a lot!!

  15. catrymer
    Staff

    You're very welcome!

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