Potato, תפוח אדמה.

October 18, 2022 7:09 AM

How to wrangle two languages into a social media post caption, one of which reads left to right and the other right to left... when one's laptop environment is set up for left-to-right?

Note the incorrect location of the period in the title to this question. I can't fix it.

I'm doing some social media work for an organization in Spain. Since we serve the migrant community, it would be lovely to have both Spanish and Arabic captions for our posts.

A colleague did what looked to be a thoughtful translation of my Spanish language caption into Arabic. I attempted to copy and paste that into the caption text field in Instagram on Firefox. (I'm running Windows 11.)

The text field diligently left-aligned the Arabic text and did very bizarre things with the punctuation. I attempted to move things around, and it just got worse. I wound up having to omit the Arabic completely, which is sad.

I have NO idea where to ask for help with this. Firefox community? Windows forum? The moon?

Thanks!

posted by Sheydem-tants to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

First, try setting your device language input to match. It's an easy quick step and can help make sure if it's really an Instagram problem. If you Google language input settings and your OS you should find instructions or you can just go poke around keyboard settings until you find languages/international.
posted by Lady Li at 7:46 AM on October 18, 2022

There are invisible Unicode markers that set text direction that can be inserted into your text.
posted by music for skeletons at 7:48 AM on October 18, 2022

Just came in to mention the Unicode left-to-right and right-to-left markers that music for skeletons mentioned. That's what they're for.
posted by number9dream at 8:39 AM on October 18, 2022

If you need to copy these characters (since it's very likely you won't be able to type them in or use the HTML entity versions on social media), here's the right-to-left mark and the left-to-right mark, which should allow you to copy them to your clipboard manually.

That said, the Unicode bidi algorithm isn't the easiest thing in the world to deal with. I was trying to get an example here in this question and wasn't able to get it to work, either.
posted by Aleyn at 12:53 PM on October 18, 2022

Hi all, after I posted, I noticed that the display of the language in WhatsApp on Firefox was left aligned. Firefox for Windows appears to be the worst at handling right to left languages: Edge is slightly better.

The fix: I found a couple of text editors that handle RTL gracefully. Then I edited the captions to copy and paste the text, using the Android apps for Instagram and Facebook. And Bob was my uncle! Success.

The Android app text fields are much, much better at handling changes of text direction than the browsers for Windows that I tried
posted by Sheydem-tants at 3:27 AM on October 19, 2022