Setting preferences for Rich UI bidirectional text

When you establish preferences for Rich UI bidirectional text, you provide initial values for the bidirectional settings assigned to widgets as they are dragged from the palette and dropped on the Design surface.

You can set these preferences only if you previously enabled bidirectional text as follows:

From the main menu, click Window > Preferences. The Preferences dialog box is displayed.
Expand EGL and select Bidirectional text. The Bidirectional text page is displayed.
Select the Enable bidirectional support checkbox. After this check box is selected, the other options are available.
To display and edit the bidirectional text fields in visual mode (the way the text will be displayed), select Enable visual data ordering.
For languages that read from right to left, select Enable right-to-left orientation.

Here are the steps for setting the Rich UI preferences:

From the main menu, click Window > Preferences. The Preferences dialog box is displayed.
Expand EGL, Rich UI, and then Appearance; and click on Bidirectional text. The Bidirectional text page is displayed.
Establish the following settings:
Widget Orientation
The setting is either LTR (left-to-right) or RTL (right to left):
- When you specify LTR, the widgets act as non-bidirectional widgets
- When you specify RTL, the widgets are mirrored; that is, scroll bars for dropdown lists appear on the left, the text-typing orientation for input fields is right-to-left, and the text is right-aligned
Text Layout
The setting is either Visual or Logical:
- If the setting is Visual and the user types "A" and then "B" (and if "A" and "B" are characters in a bidirectional language), the displayed characters are "AB". The order of display is the order of input, left to right, which is also the order in which the data is stored in local memory.
- If the setting is Logical, the displayed characters are "BA".
In most cases, Visual is appropriate for Arabic or Hebrew content derived from a machine that runs z/OS® or IBM® i.
Reverse Text direction

The setting indicates whether to reverse the text direction in the widget.

Symmetric Swapping

This setting indicates whether to replace pairs of special characters and in this way to preserve the logical meaning of the presented text. If the value is "Yes", the effect is to replace paired characters such as <, >, [, and { with >, <, ], and }.

Numeric Swapping

Lets you use Hindi numerals in Arabic text. To use Hindi numerals, set numericSwap and reverseTextDirection to Yes.
If you want to return the settings on the Bidirectional text pane to the original product settings, click Restore Defaults.
Click Apply to save your changes and remain on the Preferences dialog box. Alternatively, click OK to save the changes and exit the dialog box; or click Cancel to cancel the changes and exit the dialog box.