Hello Hans,

I looked more into this and have now "fixed" everything but the margin-related alternatives. In the attached file, I have redefined one macro and two setups from strc-con.mkvi. These involve changing three \vtop's to \autodirvtop's as well as changing left and flushleft to right and flushright (and the other way around) depending on paragraph direction.

Now it is possible to get the exact mirror behavior for RTL/LTR if one sets headalign properly. I tested it on alternatives in {left, right, top, serried, hanging} and with hang=x option.

I have run into a dilemma, though. Sometimes left and right retain their meanings in LTR and RTL and sometimes they mean opposite things. I mean, alternative=left in RTL acts similarly to alternative=right in LTR; however, headalign=left sort of has the same meaning in LTR and RTL. This sometimes becomes confusing in setting the macro/setup parameters. Is there a simple philosophy here?

—MHB

On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Mohammad Hossein Bateni <bateni@gmail.com> wrote:

Hans & Wolfgang,

I'm updating the RTL page. The version used on the wiki, apparently the stable version from texlive 2015, does certain things differently. When using alternative=serried, the last line of the paragraph has incorrect alignment. This is not the case in the beta version.

On the other hand, with bidi algorithm turned on, the wiki context places the head on the right if I use alternative=top, only when the text is in Persian. In the beta, the situation is more stable but incorrect: it places the head on the left-hand side no matter what.

—MHB

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 9:22 PM, Mohammad Hossein Bateni <bateni@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Hans and Wolfgang,

I tried different options in \definedescription and compared LTR and RTL behavior. There are certain inconsistencies/bugs in the RTL setting. Attached you can see a TeX file and the resulting PDF, trying different options. The first two pages consider different parameters in the LTR setting and then the same come in the RTL environment.

In the following I use alt instead of alternative.

Here are the issues I noticed:

1) Why isn't the head text consistently mirrored in the RTL environment? It happens only in alt=serried.

2) Option hang=2 produces a strange result for RTL. The hanging part appears on the opposite side of the head text, which somehow pushes the head text outside the text area.

3) Option alt=top for RTL still puts the head text on the left-hand side.

4) I expect the LTR and RTL versions of the same settings to mirror one another, but they do not. Although LTR/alt=left and RTL/alt=right look pretty similar (and so do LTR/alt=right and RTL/alt=left), but these pairs do not mirror one another. In particular, there is some space to the right of the head text in LTR/alt=right, while there is none to the left of LTR/alt=left. The same thing shows in the margin alternatives where the distance between the head text and the body is different in RTL and LTR.

—MHB