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S1000D Text Direction - Left-to-Right or Right-to-Left

- Thursday, 16th September 2021

When reading a Technical Publication, irrespective of the text direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), the first page will always be the Recto. However, left-to-right publications have a Recto with a left gutter while right-to-left publications have a Recto with a right gutter (our back is their front).

Left-to-right (Recto has a left gutter)

Left-to-right (Recto has a left gutter)

Right-to-left (Recto has a right gutter)

Right-to-left (Recto has a right gutter)

In the Arabic example below, our Docuneering XSL-FO stylesheets have configured the first page, as a right-to-left Recto which is evident by the larger gutter margin on the right-hand side. Page items are also correctly left or right align based on the direction of text.

In addition, the stylesheets also configure the number format so the correct glyphs are output based on the selected language. In the example below, the Data Module has been configured with the language code AR which means Page, Paragraph and Figure numbers are output using Arabic numerals.

Apologies for any poor Arabic translations ... we used Google Translate to demo the principal.



Arabic - Right-to-left Recto with right-hand gutter

Docuneering - S1000D Stylesheets - Right to Left


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