Arabic writing is backwards

When localizing my game in Arabic i found that the text i write would appear backwards on the roblox UI, as Arabic is written right to left. There for I have to write my text backwards so it appears right on the UI.

This is not a place specific bug, and it happens every time.

Here’s some text in Arabic that you can use to test this on.
(in case you want to know what it means: “Follow us on twitter for secret codes!”)

The way it should be: تابعونا علي تويتر للحصول علي رموز سرية
The way I have to write it: سرية رموز علي للحصول تويتر علي تابعونا

While it was a fun little game where I wrote Arabic backwards it takes massive amounts of time for me to do this and is really complicated.

Steps: ( i guess… ? )
Open a roblox place
put in a Textlabel
put the first example I gave, it’ll appear like how the second example appears here.
take out the first example and put the second example in the textlabel… it’ll appear as the first example appears here.

24 Likes

Agree, this behavior needs to at least stated somewhere, at most reversed.

For cases like this, it might be a good idea to have Roblox state somewhere when writing in certain languages that the language is usually written backwards.

3 Likes

Maybe a property on text objects to toggle between left-right and right-left display?

4 Likes

Does this same issue occur with languages like Hebrew or Kurdish? I personally do not speak either of them, but know they are written right to left, similarly to Arabic.

I do not know as I don’t read/write nor speak them but if they are right to left I would assume this would effect them as well

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We’re aware of the issue. The fix is for us to implement something called the Unicode BiDirectional Algorithm, which will make Arabic automatically render correctly right to left just like in web browsers. I’ll try to work on it soon.

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Hello, sorry for the annoyance but we are still waiting, an update has not yet taken effect.

Unfortunately, this isn’t currently a priority, so I haven’t had time to work on it.

You can find more information here.

However if you would like, I’ve made a handy function you can use to fix this issue via script:

1 Like

Support for this shipped earlier this year:

(Bumping this old thread to close it out, and in case anyone runs into it via search results.)

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