55 replies to this topic

[Zkaka1]

Dear Evernote Developers,

I complied a chart for your convenience, that specifies how many people in the world are used to write from Right to Left on a daily basis:


SOURCE: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ar ... w%2C+farsi

250,000,000 people to be more or less exact. The potential user base of Evernote is of course much less, but don't forget that Evernote users are entrepreneurs, bloggers, publishers, developers etc. that use the software to reach a crowd of a quarter billion in size.

Just read this wikipedia article to get a sense of the magnitude http://en.wikipedia....logging_in_Iran
AN EXCERPT FROM THE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE:
With more than 700,000 Persian blogs, mostly based in Iran, the Persian language is ranked as the second-most-popular language in the entire blogosphere.

Also, check out this video: "IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers"

The bug is known for a long time, you can't write from Right to Left in Evernote. Even if you write from an iPhone, or other syncing-enabled software to Evernote - the moment you sync, it's automatically goes back Left to Right. This is absolutely crazy. We're in the year 2010. How many lines of code are needed in order to keep a block of text from aligning to its native side?

Case in Point: This keeps us from using Evernote.

Please, Developers of Evernote, please tell us how much time it will take to solve this issue - your software is great and unique and there aren't really many good alternatives - can you please solve this RTL issue?

Take a moment and think about it. You introduce many new features all the time - but leave something so fundamental behind.

Yours Truly,
Right to Left People of the World

[jbenson2]

Of course, the most important missing point in this analysis is:

How many of the "Right to Left" crowd know how to use a computer?

[jefito]

@jbenson2: was that supposed to be funny?

@Zkaka1: We here in the West are still coming to terms with globalization of software; changing large established software bases into UniCode, enabling R-to-L systems, etc. can take a long time and a lot of effort. For some of us, supporting English-only has really been a matter of reaching a large enough market easily. Some companies will continue that practice, mainly because it's a matter of resources or return-on-investment for them. That's their business choice. I hope that Evenote gets there eventually for you.

~Jeff

[jbenson2]

Jefito asks: "@jbenson2: was that supposed to be funny?"

No, it is a question that points out a very obvious missing fact in the original post.

When I watch the news about "Right to Left" countries, then read about failure to launch the One Laptop Per Child program in the developing countries, it seems like a very logical question.

Yes, I know that developing countries use both systems, but if we want to analyze statistics, then what is the answer to the following:

Computer literacy % - "Left to Right" Countries
Computer literacy % - "Right to Left" Countries

[jefito]

Were the topic accessibility for the visually impaired, would you then be asking how many of the 'blind crowd' were computer literate? It just seemed an odd way to phrase the question.

That being said, I take your point that the potential size of a particular market ought to be gauged for potential return on company investment, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that the preeminence of the English language in the software world does do a disservice to the speakers of other languages. The cited languages are in fact used by educated, computer literate people in established countries. Meanwhile, the 'developing world' is so named because its inhabitants are, well, developing, meaning that that market is necessarily growing. Any rational company (I include Evernote of course) would take this into account.

Yes, I know that developing countries use both systems, but if we want to analyze statistics, then what is the answer to the following:

Computer literacy % - "Left to Right" Countries
Computer literacy % - "Right to Left" Countries

Since there are no such thing as a "Left to Right" or Right to Left" countries, the answers to these questions would be pretty much meaningless.

~Jeff

[jbenson2]

Jefito said: "Since there are no such thing as a "Left to Right" or Right to Left" countries, the answers to these questions would be pretty much meaningless."

Yup, confirms my point about the questionable "Right to Left" statistics quoted in the original post.

[engberg]

Thanks for the feedback. 12 months ago, Evernote only supported one language (English). Since then, we've added around 10 more. Each of these take several months of work to properly localize our applications and our text processing algorithms. We're constantly adding more languages and appreciate the interest.

Thanks

[jefito]

Thanks for the feedback. 12 months ago, Evernote only supported one language (English). Since then, we've added around 10 more. Each of these take several months of work to properly localize our applications and our text processing algorithms. We're constantly adding more languages and appreciate the interest.

Thanks

Bravo. My company has only just started down the path of being able to support more than one language, in a large code base. We're getting to the point where content (it's maps) can be displayed in other languages, but internationalizing the entire UI will take a much longer time.

~Jeff

[Zkaka1]

Thanks for the feedback. 12 months ago, Evernote only supported one language (English). Since then, we've added around 10 more. Each of these take several months of work to properly localize our applications and our text processing algorithms. We're constantly adding more languages and appreciate the interest.

Thanks

Thank you.

[pendolino]

any plans to include arabic in the translation/localization effort? its one of the top 5 languages in the world and the first language of a quarter billion people.

[engberg]

Thanks for the feedback. We've added a number of languages in the last year with the help of our community translators. Arabic requires some additional effort for text entry (right to left) and for image processing and OCR (since the script isn't Latin). So this is something we'd like to see, but is a bit more effort than something like Dutch.

[pendolino]

thanks for responding. it does seem like right to left is a hassle relatively but at least we know you've considered it the only other right to left language that i know of is hebrew although i think some asian languages may do the same and traditional japanese goes top to bottom (or was that chinese?).

[oronm]

i have been waiting for a long time for it :/

[mindgames]

Just came here to check if rtl language support had improved any since I first used evernote - which was soon after its initial release (IIRC). Its lack of Arabic support was what limited its usefulness for me and led to my stopping to use it altogether, and seems - from your post - things haven't changed very much, which is a shame.

[amirmasoudabdol]

I wish I could type RTL in Evernote. It's not too hard for implementation but don't know why Evernote doesn't do it.

[mst500]

hi,
please adding RTL feature in the Editor program
thank.

[helix]

Similar request has been posted a couple of months ago.
I have mentioned there that there is an add-on named BiDi (for bidirectional) that solves this problem in Thunderbird and Firefox.
Please look at http://bidiui.mozdev.org/index.html.

[amirmasoudabdol]

Please rate at this forum for adding RTL support to Evernote http://gsfn.us/t/2e7bk

[gbarry]

Thanks for keeping this top of mind for us.

Just a quick note on our Get Sat forum, for those out there looking for support or specific feedback--while we monitor the Get Sat site fairly regularly, it's far easier (and faster) to obtain feedback from Evernote Evangelists and Evernote Employees on our official forums.

[gbarry]

I might also add that if your browser supports RTL, then our web version will allow it.