Android RTL Text Direction

Question

I am attempting support RTL locales in my application however I ran into the following issue. Now I say issue but it might not even be an issue due to my unfamiliarity of RTL locales so here it goes.

Below are 3 text views. Note the following outputs have been made with RTL forced on via the dev option.

Test In English LTR

Test In English RTL Forced

I found it strange that it didn't align to the right even though I said android:gravity="start" like how it works with padding and margin etc. so I looked at other answers and came across android:textDirection="locale".

Test In English RTL Forced Using Text Direction Locale

Now this is mirroring correctly on both LTR and RTL but then I noticed the following behaviour with the punctuation. This raised a eyebrow whether or not this is correct because I was comparing with Google Play Store, Facebook and Whats App with RTL forced and I did not see this when looking at paragraphs with punctuation which makes me believe I did something wrong.

Full Layout Code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    tools:context=".MainActivity">

    <TextView
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:gravity="start"
        android:text="@string/test_one"
        android:textColor="@android:color/black"
        android:textDirection="locale"
        android:textSize="24sp" />

    <TextView
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_marginTop="10dp"
        android:gravity="start"
        android:text="@string/test_two"
        android:textColor="@android:color/black"
        android:textDirection="locale"
        android:textSize="24sp" />

    <TextView
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_marginTop="10dp"
        android:gravity="start"
        android:text="@string/test_three"
        android:textColor="@android:color/black"
        android:textDirection="locale"
        android:textSize="24sp" />

</LinearLayout>

Other code

The following is set in my manifest file

 android:supportsRtl="true"

And this is my strings

<string name="test_one">Good Job. You did well!</string>
<string name="test_two">3 hours ago</string>
<string name="test_three">Select Option:</string>

Please forgive how naive this might be sounding and enlighten me! I wish to provide comfortable RTL support!

Answer 1

Adding android:textDirection="locale" to the TextView and android:supportsRtl="true" will do the trick. However, textDirection="locale" changes the direction in order to locale which is en or fa or it is ar. (Depends on device's language)

And to be clear enough, it's working properly because the text you have in the TextView is LTR and you used RTL direction which as you can see, it made the direction RTL and there is no problem with that. Also, using android:gravity="start" will probably force it to use from start which I suppose, it will start from LTR. (I'd suggest removing android:gravity="start" and let the Android(In order to device's language) decide which one is the best)

So, to test if it is working or not, you can set the text to arabic or persian language as follows:

android:text="این یک تست است"

If it started from RTL and with "این", so it works as expected.