Open Dental Forum

Hello,
I am very much interested in translating Open Dental into Arabic language, for this I investigated the Translation option currently given in Open Dental. Although it seems that it'll work like if one specifies the Arabic equivalent of all changeable labels from Tools>Translation Menu but it will raise another problem which is of 'direction'. Since Arabic is written from right to left so the controls layout should be from right to left. I tried this by changing the RightoleftLayout property of Form from false to true and it worked.

Now what I want to ask is setting the RightToLeftLayout of Form to true for every form if the lanugage is Arabic is the correct way or there is some better way possible?

I'm acutally having quite a bit of trouble getting it to even run. There are constant complaints about invalid dates. I set it to Arabic (Saudi Arabia). Can you tell me what specific country you set it to? Did you have to do any unusual calendar settings to get it to work? I've included a screenshot of the window where I'm trying to change the calendar setting.

Nevermind. The third option seems to do the trick. Now, back to your question. I'm working with FormPatientEdit to test. I actually also had to set RightToLeft=Yes for the form in addition to RightToLeftLayout=True. So is that how you really want it, with the OK button in the lower left, kind of mirror image of the ordinary layout? Here's a screenshot of what I have so far. I only translated the Address field to Arabic (probably wrong). Is this similar to what you are seeing?

I just added 3 lines of code to the program which sets those two properties for all the windows in the entire program. There will still need to be some fine tuning in some of the windows. Just let us know which ones are problems for you.

Hello,
Yeah i forgot to mention in my post about the date/time issue, you solved it tough.
But now about the actual matter, could you please paste those three lines here? And what do think about working this way, means what we want is to make arabic language available just like spanish/italian to be downloaded from your website and it will automatically change the layout and use translated text instead of default english one?

Between, I am also seeing the same mirror image when Form.RightToLeftLayout is set to true. One thing you can notice that all form controls except those are in groupbox are right-to-left , I dont know why it didnt apply the same layout to groupbox and its childrens.


regards,
Waqas Hussain Siddiqui
SofDigital Systems - Al-Hokail Group
Phone: +922135312782
Skype: enggwaqas
Email: waqas.hussain-at-sofdigital.com

I already committed the code. All you have to do is another update using Tortoise. Version 7.2 and the head. The group box issue is annoying. I think it might require a plugin and manual fixing. But it doesn't seem too bad temporarily. I will look at groupboxes and see if there is any way to automate that.

OK, 4 more lines of code fixed all the group box layout issues. Done.

Hi Jordan,

Four years on from this discussion, although Open Dental is still the ONLY international multilingual software on the market with invaluable support of the middle-eastern languages, it seems complete right-to-left (RTL) support, i.e. mirroring of the ordinary layout, is somehow still lacking in the software.

I wouldn't argue the software with the current view (version 14.2) is still very much usable for the average "RTL" user, but it would definitely be nicer if the layout could be converted right to left altogether, confirming what you suggested here in the 3rd post of this thread:

jordansparks wrote: So is that how you really want it, with the OK button in the lower left, kind of mirror image of the ordinary layout?

Yes Jordan, that's how we want it, everything mirrored, even the Appt, Family, Account, etc modules button on the right-hand side and Op 1, 2, 3, etc starting from right to left, week view respecting the start day of the week as set in the module settings, or that one set in Regional settings of Windows etc---many countries start on Sat---and this week view could also go RTL. Then one could go about and tell everybody that Open Dental is software that fully supports every conceivable language/culture on the planet, including middle-eastern right-to-left languages, like Arabic, Farsi/Persian, and Hebrew.

Of further note, using a local build of version 14.2.19.0 as a test, the Windows calendar for Iran locale, for example, prints out week day names in full, which makes the calendar twice as wide as the usual OD calendar. I tested this with many other locales (both middle-eastern and western) and there are variances in the calendar width Windows provides, and then the buttons and groupboxes below seem kind of condensed, as they could have 'expanded' to the column width. Wouldn't it be nicer if a dynamic width with a rather different logic was used to layout the buttons and groupboxes etc. in OD?

I know this introduces a big wobble for the developers but I'm a nitpicker (call me a nerd!), and don't really fancy going forward with having to locally fork such a nice elaborate project just for the sake of RTLing it. A little bit of more RTL support on the developer side will be very much appreciated. And I know you're rightfully busy with EHR certification etc, but a bit of attention on this side wouldn't hurt anybody!

Cheers,

Sorry, we just don't have the resources. Rather than forking, a plugin might do the trick. I know it would require some resources on your end, but I don't have a better answer.