Wt

Romain Mardulyn wrote:

In RTL mode, Wt replaces the right by the left and vice-versa. This means that in RTL mode, the Side::Left value is actually means Side::Right . This is great because it allows to use the same code for RTL and LTR mode. This can, however, be quite confusing when developing an application primarily in RTL.

To help developing primarily in RTL, I think it would be helpful to have equivalent enums but with the RTL specific name. For instance, we would have an RtlSide enum class, for which RtlSide::Left is used to signify the left side when in RTL, but the right side in LTR.

I agree that the current behavior can be confusing when developing primarily in RTL, but I’m not sure that introducing a separate RtlSide enum is the best solution.

I think the underlying issue is that Side::Left and Side::Right are currently being used to represent two different concepts: physical sides and logical sides.

Instead of introducing an RTL-specific enum, it may be cleaner to add logical values such as LineStart and LineEnd to the existing Side enum.

For example:

• Side::Left / Side::Right would always refer to the physical left/right side.
• Side::LineStart / Side::LineEnd would refer to the logical start/end of the line, and would automatically map to left/right depending on the document direction.

This would be particularly useful for applications that support both LTR and RTL languages. With a separate RtlSide enum, the developer would have to choose between two different enum types depending on the context, which could make bilingual applications more complicated and error-prone.

With logical sides, the intent is explicit and independent of the document direction. For example, if an element should always be placed at the beginning of the text direction, the code could simply use:

Side::LineStart

and the same code would work correctly in both LTR and RTL modes.

So rather than adding an RTL-specific abstraction, I think adding LineStart and LineEnd to the existing API would provide a more general solution. It would also follow the distinction between physical and logical directions that is commonly used in modern layout systems.