[AR] A proper way to visualize Arabic pages

[Ahmed-5]

Since Arabic is a language where you write from right to left , we face problems with visualizing docs written in Arabic properly. The text at first would seem like a mess and the equations scatters in a strange way when rendering the md files. A way I found is to use the uni-code &#x202b followed by semicolon in every paragraph and put the all equations in another curly braces but this may be impractical. an example for this: ‫ هذه الجملة تبدا من اليمين ${x = y}$ مرورا بالمعادلة و تنتهي باليسار

But if there is a better and more practical way to do this please suggest it to us.

[Atcold]

@ebetica, I think we should create a separate template for Arabic. Do you think we can automate what @Ahmed-5 is suggesting?

[mapmeld]

Following up here after our discussion on #516 It sounds like there are two places where people read the book in Arabic - Markdown on GitHub, and the web UI (correct me if I'm missing other methods this is published)

In my experience on GitHub, you need to wrap sections of Markdown in <div dir="rtl"> ... </div> or <div dir="auto"> ... </div>, sometimes on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, especially because some inline math will be left-to-right. If people typically aren't browsing the book on GItHub, I would advise not to do this, or only doing this on the intro / landing page.

For the web interface, I think it can be updated with a minimal amount of CSS, and then some careful review to see what sections need extra attention. This is where I got with just a few changes:

[Atcold]

@mapmeld, thanks for your input. The only Markdown file the user is supposed to access is README-ar.md for getting started with the repo. Otherwise, the entire course is supposed to be accessed through rendered HTML. The MD files are "source files" to generate the HTML. Let's see if @ebetica has an idea about how this could be implemented.

[ebetica]

Check out #547 - this ignores the fact that math might want to be left-to-right, and some tables have to be manually changed. I'm not familiar enough with Arabic to understand which maths may need this, etc. Maybe as we get more examples of translations, we can play with formatting better. For example, maybe all display mode math should rendered in L2R mode?

Is there another consideration, where we must reverse the behavior of the arrows as well? If you have examples of well translated English and Arabic parallel text + layouts, that would be immensely helpful.