why is there no right to left support in numbers?

we are users like you. You can post feedback to Apple using the menu item "Numbers > Provide Numbers Feedback"

In the mean time I understand that LibreOffice does support RTL

powerover999 wrote:

There is no support for RTL languages.

You should have no problem inputting rtl text into Numbers. But it does not yet have the ability to start columns from the right rather than the left. Excel for Mac 2011 does not do that either. But as Wayne noted, LibreOffice should work.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

You should have no problem inputting rtl text into Numbers.

Tom, presumably you have actually tested your response in Numbers before posting such a statement. Could you post a screenshot of how you actually do it?

I read about this mystery feature in Numbers Help, but I have had no success. Thanks.

SG

SGIII wrote:

Could you post a screenshot of how you actually do it?

Here is a shot of some nonsense text entered into cells using the Arabic keyboard layout. What are you seeing that does not display correctly? It is admittedly not as good as in Pages, there is no paragraph direction control setting yet.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

SGIII wrote:

there is no paragraph direction control setting yet.

Your mention of Pages prompted me to go there and try.

It turns out that you have to add a RTL language in Input Sources under Keyboard preferences and then quit the app and reopen it.

When I quit Numbers and relaunched I now get this:

I couldn't get that far before because I was using Chinese as my test RTL input source (because it isn't just "Greek to me"), and Numbers and Pages apparently consider Chinese to be LTR only, though it traditionally can be top to bottom, right to left, or (most common in recent usage) right to left. But adding Arabic or Hebrew to Input Sources got Numbers (after a quit and relaunch) to add those paragraph direction controls.

Maybe Apple eventually will add the ability to start table columns from the right.

SG

P.S. RTL support is apparently will be added to Excel 2016 for the Mac.

You are right, somehow I missed the Direction button in the side panel. They should have put it in the Format menu as well.

Apple has included the ability to flip to RTL format when you do a table in Pages, so hopefully it will appear in Numbers without too much delay.

I have never heard of Chinese being considered as an RTL script -- do you have a link to an example? Of course when done vertically, the columns run right to left, but that is a different issue. Support for vertical text is pretty rare even in word processors, though TextEdit can do it.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

I have never heard of Chinese being considered as an RTL script -- do you have a link to an example?

Chinese can go any which way. This quote from the Wikipedia article gives a flavor:

Signs are a particularly challenging aspect of written Chinese layout, since they can be written either left to right or right to left (the latter can be thought of as the traditional layout with each "column" being one character high), as well as from top to bottom. It is not uncommon to encounter all three orientations on signs on neighboring stores.^[26]

The most confusing are Chinese movie subtitles running right to left right above English subtitles running right to left. That really scrambles the brain if you know enough Chinese to generally follow the dialog but want to check the subtitles for meaning and exact wording!

Apple has separate Input Sources for Simplified and Traditional. Simplified characters (used in the PRC and Singapore) almost always run left to right. Traditional characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and much of the Chinese diaspora, as well as in texts dating back millennia) are what you see most often in other orientations, though they can be left to right too. Got all that?!

Good to know TextEdit can do vertical. Wouldn't have thought of that.

SG

Very interesting! I found a couple other examples with photos at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text#Chinese_characters