Re: [Docutils-users] RTL languages in reStructredText (docutils)

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2021-01-15, Abdullah Al-hadab wrote:

> Hi ,

> I have translated docutils to Arabic, and it is working fine, however,
> I am getting the direction wrong ( text is aligned to left)
> [cid:image003.jpg@01D6EB29.AA4121B0]

> I saw these two scripts on Docutils FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
> (sourceforge.io)<https://docutils.sourceforge.io/FAQ.html#can-i-produce-documents-in-right-to-left-languages>
> , which should solve this issue.

If it is only about alignment, maybe you just need a custom stylesheet.
Maybe we can design a "rtl.css" stylesheet for use with RTL languages?
(Unfortunately, I don't understand any language that uses an RTL script.)

Did you set --language=arabic (or farsi, hebrew,...)?

You can also set the language for individual elements with the "class"
argument or "class" directive. A class value of "language-mylang" is
written as `lang=mylang` in HTML.


> I followed the instruction but when I run rst2html_bidi I get the
> following error

> AttributeError: 'Element' object has no attribute 'dir'
> Exiting due to error.  Use "--traceback" to diagnose.
> Please report errors to <doc...@li...>.
> Include "--traceback" output, Docutils version (0.17b.dev [release]),
> Python version (3.7.9), your OS type & version, and the
> command line used.

Looking at docutils/docs/ref/doctree.html, I realize that "dir" is not
standard attribute in Docutils. It seems to be an addition by the
"hibidy"-enhanced custom writer.

> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "./rst2html_hibidi.py", line 38, in <module>
>     publish_cmdline(writer=HiBiDiWriter(), description=description)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/docutils/docutils/docutils/core.py", line 355, in publish_cmdline
>     config_section=config_section, enable_exit_status=enable_exit_status)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/docutils/docutils/docutils/core.py", line 220, in publish
>     output = self.writer.write(self.document, self.destination)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/docutils/docutils/docutils/writers/__init__.py", line 79, in write
>     self.translate()
>   File "./rst2html_hibidi.py", line 30, in translate
>     self.output = hibidi.hibidi_unicode(self.output, encoding=self.destination.encoding)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 34, in hibidi_unicode
>     return hibidi_str(u.encode(encoding), root).decode(encoding)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 39, in hibidi_str
>     hibidi_dom(doc, root)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 50, in hibidi_dom
>     assign_dirs(node)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 101, in assign_dirs
>     assign_dirs(child, node.dir)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 101, in assign_dirs
>     assign_dirs(child, node.dir)
>   File "/home/geohadab/github/hibidi.py", line 97, in assign_dirs
>     if not node.dir:
> AttributeError: 'Element' object has no attribute 'dir'

This shows that the problem is in the 3rt-party module "hibidy.py".
Maybe making line 97 failproof changing it to something like

     if not getattr(node, "dir"):

helps. (But I don't know which default to use and whether
there are other follow-up errors.)

Günter