MadCap Flare Has Supported the Authoring and Publishing of Bi-directional Content Since 2013
We would like to clarify an incorrect statement that appeared in an article titled “The Latest and Best Features in Adobe’s FrameMaker 2015,” from Jang F.M. Graat in the July/August issue. In this article, Graat states:
“product manuals or Web pages might contain text in multiple languages on the same page. This implies that one language direction switch on the top level, as is the case in Madcap Flare, is not going to solve the issue. True RTL language support requires support for bi-directional content….”
This is a misleading and untrue representation of MadCap Flare’s functionality. MadCap Flare does natively support both authoring and publishing of bi-directional content, namely right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian together with left-to-right (LTR) content. In fact, this functionality was introduced by MadCap in early 2013 with the release of MadCap Flare 9.0.
In Flare, bi-directional content is not only supported at the project level, but down to the topic, paragraph, and sentence level. A single topic, for example, can contain any number of languages. Furthermore, if a single sentence contains both LTR and RTL languages, Flare will treat each language appropriately in that sentence.
Flare also includes options to help convert projects that may have been translated into Arabic from English, for instance, but not natively authored in the RTL language. Some of these options include Invert Styles, Invert Page Layouts, and Invert Image Callouts.
For more information, visit www.madcapsoftware.com.
—Francis Novak, VP, Product Management
