Factorio Forums

Most notably affects campaign descriptions and message boxes (the ones closable with TAB, e.g. when a new game starts) - the first things a player encounters.
Example from demo.ini:


↑ What it should look like vs. What it actually looks like ↓


Notice two issues: 1) The order of the rows is reversed. 2) Lines wrap at wrong positions.

To clarify, in terms of the order of reading (indicated by the numbers below): The cause of this is the interaction of the line-wrapping algorithm and the BiDi algorithm, where lines are wrapped after a certain number of characters, but since in RTL the logical character order is the opposite of the visual order, wraps are added after X characters from the end of the string rather than from its beginning.

Previously mentioned here. Illustration of how this was done on WinXP:

Notice the reverse order of buttons, green arrows, positioning of text in the title, menubar entries, scrollbar alignment, side of start button rounding, gravity of the taskbar item etc.

Currently, the majority of the texts are left-justified instead of right-justified. See 2nd image in the previous point, as well as:



This is how it should appear: Another effect of this is that physical units (strings like "100 kW" etc.) are untranslateable, as explained here.
Likely cause: the order of UI elements from left to right when some physical quantity is presented is `[value] [SI-prefix][SI-symbol]` but this doesn't work when reading RTL.
Current workaround: SI units and prefixes are untranslated.

Last official comment on this was in 2016. See explanations about logical vs visual here: 1,2. To judge for yourself how bad this is, take a look at this post.
I put this last only because mods aren't something all players encounter right from the start.

This is related to the way multi-line strings are defined, with a printf-esque `\n` character where a split would appear. One big issue here is that the newline "code" must not be translated, so we have to switch languages (and writing directions) mid-string to reproduce it. One cannot even judge whether the result is correct when looking at it (and it usually isn't!). Example:



Suggestion: Instead of "\n" use a single character that is never used in strings, like # or $ or ^, which doesn't change the writing direction. Alternatively, eliminate this character altogether and make use of the multiline support of Crowdin. (Though more universal, this solution might require changes to the way strings are stored in the game files.)