Arabic-L:GEN:right to left in VB6 textbox query

Tue Oct 1 19:58:58 UTC 2002

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Arabic-L: Tue 01 Oct 2002
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1) Subject:right to left in VB6 textbox query

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1)
Date:  01 Oct  2002
From: GnhBos at aol.com
Subject:right to left in VB6 textbox query

Dear List Members,

I thought you may be interested, if you like to comment,
please  email the undersigned
who will forward your response:

 >>
My name is Dr. Laurence Shatkin. I'm a consultant working in
the field of career information, based in Titusville, NJ. Recently
I developed a career guidance and information system called
Career Oasis for the King Fahd Univesity of Petroleum
and Minerals in Saudi Arabia. It runs in Arabic and English
and was written in Visual Basic 6.0.

That leads me to my complaint about VB6, which I hope will
eventually come to the attention of the wizards at Microsoft.
ALMOST all of the VB6 form controls can be made to display
text in true right-to-left (RTL), which is what is necessary
for Arabic. I say "almost," because the RTF textbox refuses
to support RTL. I tried every gimmick I could learn of, including
inserting an invisible ASCII character that's supposed to mean
"RTL starts here." (I forget the ASCII code; it doesn't matter,
because it didn't work.) Sure, you can right-align the text, but
that's not true RTL: for example, bullets still appearn on the wrong
(left) side of the line. I brought in one of the computer science  
experts
from KFUPM, and he was stumped, too.

In the end, I solved my problem by using a browser control for
the text, outputting the text as HTML, and loading this HTML
into that window. As long as it starts with the tag <html dir='RTL'>,
the browser window will do RTL just fine. Now, why can't an RTF
textbox control do just as well???

Shukran JazeeLan,

George N. Hallak  
http://www.arabicsoftware.net
http://www.aramedia.com

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End of Arabic-L:  01 Oct  2002