Interface software goes both ways for global use

Espial, the leading provider of software for set-top boxes and mobile handsets, today announced the capabilities of right-to-left (RTL) rendering of content for consumer electronics devices.

Espial, the leading provider of software for set-top boxes and mobile handsets, today announced the capabilities of right-to-left (RTL) rendering of content for consumer electronics devices.

This capability enables international consumer electronics manufacturers to create or render RTL-based UIs that display both the text and UI components accurately on the television screen or mobile phone.

In addition, Espial software can render web pages with RTL text layout of tables, forms and other web elements.

The ability to easily render RTL text and page design for a specific locale is a product commitment from Espial to ensure manufacturers and designers can address the international markets of Europe and the Middle East.

While using the same underlying technology to achieve results, the look and navigation of the user interface can be quickly and easily customised to the geographic market and multiple customer demographics, using simple web authoring languages like HTML.

RTL support is optional and can be implemented in the design, based on market requirements.

"Espial is committed to deploying the most advanced features and functionality for our clients", says Denise MacDonell, Director of Product Marketing for Espial.

"Espial already provides a single code base that includes Unicode support, common text encoding and is more easily localised than any other embedded solution".

"Adding right to left support for web content and UI components results in a powerful approach to doing business internationally".

Rendering text in the proper order is only one component of a successfully localised software application.

In addition to text rendering, the technology must be conscious that the layout, component orientation, component alignment and text interaction can be affected.

For RTL languages, the most important information will render in the upper-right side of the GUI, rather than traditional upper-left for LTR rendering.

In addition, Espial software intelligently controls the caret functions, intuitively reversing the caret orientation and movement within a RTL environment.

Localisation can be achieved completely or on a per-component basis.

For example, a drop-down list of North American product names may not need to be localised for a Hebrew market.

The locale of the application can be set to Hebrew but the product drop-down can be easily set to English.

Not just limited to components, GUIs written in Hebrew or Arabic are often bidirectional in nature, including text written in other languages (ie English).

Espial software intelligently adapts to this bidirectional requirement, displaying text and content components in a mixture of RTL and LTR rendering.

Additionally the requirement for mixing text flow for numerical input and lists which or may not contain text in a RTL flowing language is addressed with enhancements to HTML, CSS and GUI component properties ensuring the same flexibility that content developers require for Web based content addressing these regions.

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