Trailing "..." now showing as leading for longer title if using <align>right</align> in label

[latts9923]

Trailing "..." now showing as leading for longer title if using right in label

[Markman-B]

I can confirm this issue on Android - Kodi 21 beta 2.

[scott967]

"trailing" and "leading" have different connotations if your UI is LTR/RTL

[scott967]

[CastagnaIT]

i think could be a kind of "side effect" of a my old PR (#22691) to have trailing dots "..." on the left for the right aligned text
that is used for GUI settings that have double text labels (left-description + right-value)
i think that should be added a new parameter to label control to choose the truncation position and so the relative "..." dots position

[CrystalP]

The new behavior seems more correct to me, the ellipsis is supposed to be a placeholder for the truncated text, which happens to be to the left, when right-aligning.

[MikeSiLVO]

I think it should remain as it always was (LTR).
When looking at a list, in most languages, I'd expect to be able to read the start of the item and not the tail end of it.

I don't want to be exclusionary so maybe there is some way to make the RTL/LTR of the language control this?

Default to (LTR)

Arabic / Aramaic / Azeri / Dhivehi / Maldivian / Hebrew / Kurdish / Persian / Urdu (RTL)
The list is shorter on the RTL side.

No idea if this is feasible or not but displaying the end of a sentence for the majority of languages seems like the opposite of what should be done.

[CastagnaIT]

by check the source code i dont see there is a check for RTL/LTR used to establish the text truncate position (left/right)

example old kodi behaviour:

current master:

i can confirm that currenlty its not ideal in this situation
i think the best thing for now is restore the default LTR truncation
and add a new control setting like "reversedTruncate", where can be used e.g. for the specific GUI settings

add an automatic truncate position by checking RTL/LTR text i think its too much invasive at current development stage
i will try check if im able do the mentioned change

[CastagnaIT]

if someone can give a feedback for the fix there are some test builds:
android ARM: http://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/android/arm/kodi-20240202-a27b3d71-truncate_text_edit-armeabi-v7a.apk
android ARM64: http://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/android/arm64-v8a/kodi-20240202-a27b3d71-truncate_text_edit-arm64-v8a.apk
Windows: http://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/windows/win64/KodiSetup-20240202-a27b3d71-truncate_text_edit-x64.exe

[CrystalP]

ok there was no "before" screenshot in the issue and the title was about the ellipsis, not the text truncation.
Sure if the expectation is the truncation of the end of the text then the ellipsis should be on the right as well.

[scott967]

Again, in a bidi world "end of text" means "logical end" of string and "visual display" is different, and a problem when a neutral direction character like punctuation is at the logical beginning or end of string, as bidi algorithm specifies that a higher level direction variable determines if it is treated as LTR or RTL (assuming no explicit direction control unicode in the string). Right justified would be "normal" alignment in RTL script, so ellipsis visually to the left is expected.

[latts9923]

@CastagnaIT
I just installed your test build, and the truncated title is now displaying the "..." on the right side of the text.

If it's determined that RTL text should display the "..." on the left side of the label, it would be nice to have the option to switch it by adding a new control setting like "reversedTruncate". Thanks for your time!

[CastagnaIT]

@CrystalP the "before" screenshot appears like comment above here (so #24610 (comment))

@scott967 i think one of the problems to make it "automatic" (RTL/LTR) is that the ellipses "..." are injected while in rendering side, and so are not part of the text itself:
https://github.com/CastagnaIT/xbmc/blob/35893ece3cac34d1bcb30215ad34b11fdf7935a2/xbmc/guilib/GUIFontTTF.cpp#L487-L497