josephwright
Add "RTL" option for right to left languages
This is a feature request.
I am used to use beamer for my presentations, and I find myself comfortable in case of latin presentations (left to right) in contrast with arabic presentations (right to left).
For every theme you need to redefine a couple of templates (add some commands) which becomes troublesome with time
My aim is adding an option "RTL" which simplify the procedures and change alignement of text in frame components
Example of desired feature
\documentclass[RTL]{beamer}
\usefonttheme{serif}
\usetheme{Madrid}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{hello world}
\setRTL
hello world
\begin{enumerate}
\item
first item
\item
second item
\end{enumerate}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
I'm sympathetic, but there is a lot of work needed to get RTL right, and the current beamer codebase is not really the ideal starting point.
Can you show me guidlines to obtain style for right to left presentations based on beamer ( perhaps creating new class "rl-beamer" with modification on beamer sty files )
@josephwright take a look to https://github.com/seloumi/rl-beamer In your opinion creat new class from beamer only for right to left presentations or improving changes (not yet complete) and add "rtl" option to beamer ?
@seloumi You are of course free to fork beamer (though for a public release you'll need to rename all files). I'm wary of providing a 'simple' option to the class because RTL is complicated and there are lots of assumptions in beamer and elsewhere about text running LTR. I'd also want to test against bidi, etc.
Probably the best approach in my mind is for you to make a pull request against beamer in a separate branch, with a reasonably wide set of demos for different things. I can then take a proper look and we can then agree a merge plan with an idea of what is (and isn't) expected to work for users.
(BTW, one fundamental problem is that RTL only really works properly in LuaTeX, at least from a conceptual POV, as the RTL support in pdfTeX/XeTeX only works in hmode and is at the engine level a hack. And yes I know lots of people use RTL with pdfTeX/XeTeX ...)
@seloumi I notice your repo isn't based on the beamer one, it's a new one with the files checked in. That makes it very tricky for me to pick stuff up: really would be easier if you start from a fork.
@seloumi just wanted to make sure you saw the comment above. Thanks for your work on it!
Related: bidi now has extensive support for RTL in beamer, see this talk from the TUG22 conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_1G7IltJYs
