CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpright-to-leftphpwordbidi
Amr H. Abd Elmajeed
Amr H. Abd Elmajeed

Reputation: 1521

Insert RTL text correctly in PHPWord template

I'm using PHPWord template processor to insert some text in a template.

The word template is formatted LTR as all the labels are English.

Here is the line in the word template:

User Name: ${name}

Here is the PHP line that replaces the value:

$template->setValue('name', $user->name);

The sentence is bidirectional. The label is English (LTR) and the username is always Arabic (RTL).

Here is the generated line of code in document.xml, after unzipping the word file:

<w:r><w:rPr><w:b/><w:bCs/><w:lang w:val="en-US" w:bidi="ar-EG"/></w:rPr><w:t>User Name:</w:t></w:r><w:r><w:rPr><w:lang w:val="en-US" w:bidi="ar-EG"/></w:rPr><w:t xml:space="preserve"> عمرو هشام</w:t><w:tab/></w:r>

The replaced text appears correctly RTL in LibreOffice, but appears LTR (reversed) in Microsoft Word.

What can I do to make it appear correctly (RTL) in Microsoft Word ?

Upvotes: 21

Views: 1342

Answers (2)

moti irom
moti irom

Reputation: 51

After a good few hours I found a solution that works well for me without making changes to the library, which harm the ability to update the library in the future. The solution is to insert the variables in the original document while changing the language, for example User Name: ${name} insert ${name} in such a way that you first write ${} with the keyboard on the Arabic/Hebrew language or any RTL language and then insert name (The variable name) In English or any LTR language this causes the correct order to be displayed.

Upvotes: 0

morteza kavakebi
morteza kavakebi

Reputation: 1680

you just did the wrong action in the first place correcting the PHPword to work with UTF-8 strings.
according to this there are two ways to fix PHPword and i tried both. the right one is this:

On line 150, of Shared/String.php:

Replace

public static function IsUTF8($value = '') {
    return utf8_encode(utf8_decode($value)) === $value;
}

With

public static function IsUTF8($value = '') {
    return mb_check_encoding($value, "UTF-8");
}

Then, if you do

$ grep -rn "utf8_encode" .

On the project root, you will find all lines where utf8_encode is used. You will see lines like

$linkSrc = utf8_encode($linkSrc); //$linkSrc = $linkSrc;

$givenText = utf8_encode($text); //$givenText = $text;

You can simply remove the utf8_encode as shown in the comments.

Upvotes: 1

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