Setting bidirectional text preferences for the Text Form editor

The EGL Text Form editor supports languages such as Arabic and Hebrew in which the text is written right to left but numbers and Latin alphabetic strings within the text are presented left to right. For more information, see Working with bidirectional data. To change the preferences for the Text Form editor's support of bidirectional languages, follow these steps:

  1. From the menu bar, click Window > Preferences. The Preferences window opens.
  2. In the left pane of the Preferences window, expand EGL and click EGL bidi preferences.
  3. In the right pane of the Preferences window, select the preferences for the Text Form editor's support of bidirectional languages:
    • To enable the use of bidirectional language options in the Text Form editor, select the Bi-directional options enabled check box. After this check box is selected, all of the other options are available.
    • To display and edit the bidirectional text fields in visual mode (the way they will be displayed), select Enable visual data ordering.
    • For languages that read from right to left, select Enable right-to-left orientation.
    • To place a button on the Text Form editor that enables you to change the bidirectional settings for a formGroup, select Enable bidirectional settings button. With this button, you can change the bidirectional settings for an individual formGroup to be different from the settings in the Preferences window.
    • To default to visual display ordering in the Text Form editor (instead of logical ordering), select Enable visual data ordering by default.
    • To use right-to-left map coordinates for the Text Form editor, select Endable right-to-left orientation by default. When a form group is set to use right-to-left map coordinates, the top right corner is defined as the location (1,1). With a left-to-right orientation, the location (1,1) is the top left corner. The only reason to use right-to-left orientation in the form editor is to make the design of a right-to-left form easier.
    • To reverse directional punctuation characters like < and (, select Enable symmetric swapping by default.
    • To switch numerals from Hindi to Arabic, or Arabic to Hindi, select Enable numeric swapping by default.
    You can restore the EGL Text Form editor preferences window to its default settings by clicking Restore Defaults.

BIDI support for Text UI and the Text UI Debugger in Java™ environments is available on Windows-based systems only, and is not available on Linux. BIDI support is available in all COBOL environments.


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