markdownright-to-left

RTL in Markdown

Is there any existing addon spec for markdown that includes support for RTL languages?

What I'm hoping for is something like 

This paragraph is left to right
<- This paragraph is right to left

Or something... I can tweak my parser to handle this but I want to make sure it doesn't exist already.

Solution

  • Here is a JavaScript implementation of Markdown, which (according to the commit comments) adds support for RTL languages, namely Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Thaana. And it seems trivially easy to add more languages.

    https://github.com/hasenj/showdown/

    It's based on Showdown, http://attacklab.net/showdown.

    It seems to automatically understand whether or not to render the text from right to left.
    Consider this code snippet: (from the very first commit at GitHub)

    var p_tag = "<p>";
var rtl_p_tag = "<p style='direction:rtl; text-align: right'>";

// Check for RTL paragraphs: paragraphs that start with a character
// from an RTL script.
// RTL scripts are: Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Thaana
// Unicode ranges reference: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~tomw/java/unicode.html
var first_char = str.charCodeAt(str.search(/\S/)); //first non-white-space char
if(first_char >= 1424 && first_char <= 1983) 
{
    p_tag = rtl_p_tag;
}

    str = _RunSpanGamut(str);
    str = str.replace(/^([ \t]*)/g, p_tag);

    Hope this helps,
    Magnus