Configuring bidirectional text

Enable or disable bidirectional text.

About this task

Bidirectional text is useful when you want texts that have different direction orientations to appear together. For example, English text is read from left to right but Arabic text is read from right to left. If both English and Arabic texts appear on the same line, the text is bidirectional. You can enable and disable bidirectional text in the IBM® Connections settings page.

By default, bidirectional text is disabled and the text direction settings of your operating system determine how text is displayed.

When you enable bidirectional text in IBM Connections, the text that you enter in any input fields in the product is displayed according to your bidirectional text setting.

To enable bidirectional text, complete the following steps:

Procedure

  1. In your Profile menu in the IBM Connections toolbar, click Settings.
  2. In the Settings window, click Globalization.
  3. From the Calendar list, select a suitable calendar to match the bidirectional setting.
    For example: If you plan to enable Right to left text, and if your language setting is Arabic, select the Hijri calendar.
  4. Select the Enable bdirectional text check box.
  5. In the Direction of user-generated text list, select one of the following values:
    Default
    This setting uses the browser locale or language to display your text. For example, if you use English to view content in IBM Connections, then the content is displayed as left-to-right text; if you use Arabic, then the content is displayed as right-to-left text.
    Left to right
    The natural text direction for most Asian, European, Indic, and Slavic languages. Left to right is the default setting.
    Right to left
    The natural text direction for languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu.
    Contextual (character-based)
    The text direction is determined by the first strong directional character that Connections detects. For example, if you want to input both Arabic and English text, the display is determined by the first strong character that is detected. If this character is from a right to left language, all the text is displayed right-to-left. Select this option when you do not know which language will be input or when you want to input both left-to-right and right-to-left languages.
  6. Click Save.