[Mediawiki-l] RTL support in non-RTL Wikis

Fri May 13 05:18:32 UTC 2005

Hello,

I'm running an English Wiki, which contains a few articles in which
the predominant language has right-to-left (RTL) directionality
(Hebrew).

I was unable to find an elegant solution to the problem of formatting
thesearticles, which should probably boil down to something along the
lines of having the "dir=rtl lang=he" attributes added automatically
to every paragraph element and every heading. I wouldn't like to hack
something that would add "lang=he dir=rtl" to the <html> element, as
that would ruin the layout of the rest of the page (like I said, most
of the Wiki is in English).

As I have wgRawHtml set in my Wiki (it's private) I tried adding
<html><span dir=rtl lang=he></html> at the beginning of the article,
to no avail (it was overriden by the following elements, as the
document's default language was still English). The only solution so
far is to wrap *each* paragraph with <p dir=rtl>, which is unweildy
and  doesn't solve headings.

How should I go about doing this? Do you think coding a new Wiki
markup tag (#RTL, a la #REDIRECT) is the proper way?

Many thanks,
 - Aknin