Frequently-Asked Questions

Automatic Direction Detection

I've received this message, and the extension did not set its direction correctly. Why?

This could be due to one of the following:

  • Mozilla has mis-detected the message encoding, so the extension is not aware that there are actually any RTL-script characters in the message.
  • Your message contains both RTL and LTR text, and the detection algorithm simply works differently than your intuition for the message.
  • The message is in HTML rather than plain text.
  • You have set the mailnews.message_display.autodetect_direction preference to false, disabling automatic message direction detection.

Keyboard Behavior

Why does direction switching not use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+LeftShift and Ctrl+RightShift, like in Microsoft Windows and popular Hebrew keyboard layouts for X?

We are hoping to eventually do so, but we are not yet able to, due to problems in keyboard input handling in Mozilla.

Replying to Messages

When I reply to a Right-to-Left message, the message-quote bar continues to appear on the left of the message instead of moving over to the right. Can I make it behave the way I want to?

This issue has been fixed in version 0.5.1 .

Also, here are some extra rules for userContent.css which will change the color of quoted text based on the quote depth:

blockquote[type="cite"] { color: #660066 !important; } blockquote[type="cite"] blockquote { color: #007777 !important; } blockquote[type="cite"] blockquote blockquote { color: #990000 !important; } blockquote[type="cite"] blockquote blockquote blockquote { color: #000099 !important; } blockquote[type="cite"] blockquote blockquote blockquote blockquote { color: #bb6600 !important; }

Remember you can disable the bar altogether and see the textual quote '>' marks, by the setting the preference mail.quoted_graphical to false; do so using the about:config URL in the Mozilla suite or by adding the following line to your profile's user.js file:

pref("mail.quoted_graphical", false);

This FAQ item has been partially ripped off from Moofie :-)

Miscellany

I noticed that some code from the BiDi Browser UI extension was incorporated into the Mozilla codebase. Can we expect this to happen with this extension also? How soon?

That's a very perceptive question... it is possible that code adoption will also happen with this extension at some point in the future. This issue is open for discussion on the IRC channel #bidi@moznet.

Why does the extension change the behavior of the Enter key? I want the default 'Body Text'-style behavior back...

You can revert to the default Enter key behavior by setting the preference:

pref("mailnews.alternative_enter_behavior", false);

I have another issue which is not covered in this FAQ...

That's great! Submit a bug in our bugs section. Make sure to give as much detail as possible, and provide instructions for reproducing your problem.