Complex Text Layout in LibreOffice
I’m currently translating a tender document from a North African Arabic-speaking country. Even though the source language of the translation is French, when I first opened the file in LibreOffice, my office suite of choice, I noticed that the cursor was responding back to front and realised immediately this was going to slow down my progress with the job unless it was sorted out.
Fortunately, a little bit of research and a couple of configuration tweaks soon had it sorted out. Firstly, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai come under what LibreOffice describes as Complex Text Layout (CTL) languages.
To deal with CTL languages, these first have to be enabled in LibreOffice under Tools > Options > Language Settings.
That done, the LibreOffice Help wiki has instructions for working with CTL.
Currently, LibreOffice supports Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic as CTL languages.
If you select the text flow from right to left, embedded Western text still runs from left to right. The cursor responds to the arrow keys in that Right Arrow moves it “to the text end” and Left Arrow “to the text start”.
You can change the text writing direction directly be pressing one of the following keys:
- Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Right Shift Key – switch to right-to-left text entry
- Ctrl+Shift+A or Ctrl+Left Shift Key – switch to left-to-right text entry
- The modifier-only key combinations only work when CTL support is enabled.
Once CTL is enabled, LibreOffice also adds a couple of change text direction icons to the text formatting toolbar too.
