text alignment in forms with right-to-left text

tzipip

Hi!!
Recently I've been trying to create Hebrew questionnaires using the form_base, and everything is working beautifully except for the alignment of the text. The text is aligned to the left even though I set the font to hebrew and set the experiment to bi-directional text support in the general properties, and also wrote "set align right" (and set center=no in each label widget) in the form itself. What else should I do?

sebastiaan

Hi,

Right-alignment is not supported for now. I realize that's probably very annoying—if I picture how odd right-aligned text looks to my left-aligned mind.

I'll give this some thought. In principle, right-alignment would be a new feature, and new features are only included in major releases (which won't be for a while). But if this isn't too hard or risky to implement, I could make an exception. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

tzipip

Ok, thanks!!

tzipip

Is it possible to align the text to the right if I create a form using an inline script instead of the form_base?

sebastiaan

I'm afraid not. The alignment is handled by the text-rendering module, so it works the same regardless of how you render text.

For now, the only way that I can think of to right-align text, is to write your own inline_script. To get you started, the script below is a simple right-aligned text input that accepts a response when you press enter. I think this should work also with Hebrew characters, at least on systems with a Hebrew locale. See the documentation of string.printable.

import string

c = canvas()
k = keyboard()

# The top-right of the text
top, right = -200, 200

response = u''
while True:
    key, time = k.get_key()
    if key in [u'return', u'enter']:
        break
    if key in string.printable:
        response += key
    elif key == u'space':
        response += u' '
    elif key == u'backspace':
        response = response[:-1]
    c.clear()
    # Use the size of the text (the rectangle that fits around the text) to
    # determine the top-left of the text, to emulate right-alignment.
    w, h = c.text_size(response)
    c.text(response, center=False, x=right-w, y=top)
    c.show()