DITA: Override right-alignment for English text within Arabic file

0
votes

I am working on a series of computer manuals which are supplied as DITA code (a dialect of XML) and then translated before being rendered into PDFs. The PDF renderer automatically selects the RTL text direction and right-aligns the text in Hebrew and Arabic. However, there are some topics within the file that aren't translated, and it right-aligns them too. I have tried putting dir="ltr" within the <topic> tag, but that had no effect. I tried adding align="left" to the <topic> tag, then to the <p> (paragraph) clauses within it, but according to the DITA standard these tags don't recognise the align attribute, which is only available for various table elements. Is there a way to override the default (in this case, right-margin) alignment for a paragraph or larger block within a DITA file? Note that it is not feasible to rewrite the text using tables: we have to stick to the DITA structure supplied by the client.

1
alignmentarabicdita
It is very important to describe what XML format are you using before passing it to PDF formatter and what PDF formatter are you using. If you are using XSL-FO and DITA-OT bundled PDF2 plug-in to generate PDF, this plug-in does not supports @dir attribute at all and @writing-mode is determined in bookmap (map) level only. This means you may need more stylesheet work if you adopt this scenario. - tmakita

1 Answers

0
votes

What PDF renderer are you using? If the DITA Open Toolkit, 1) What version, and 2) Are you using a custom plug-in?

You might find more help on the dita-users list which is hosted on groups.io.