Comment 9 for bug 571822

This was bounced from project to project and ended up in telepathy-spec at <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30396>.

However, I'm not sure whether this is actually relevant to telepathy-spec, because I don't think the communication between Empathy and its MSN backend should need to specify the text direction if it can be detected automatically.

Is it meant to be possible to auto-detect alignment from the text of the message? It seems to be, since if I copy "שרה" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text and send it between my XMPP accounts, the edit box displays it right-aligned (however, the conversation history displays it left-aligned).

So, I think there are really three bugs here, of which we can't fix (B):

(A) For all protocols, Empathy should auto-detect whether the text should be RTL, and if so, right-align the text in the conversation history

(B) (not fixable by us!) MSN on Windows should auto-detect whether the text should be RTL in the same way as (A), rather than relying on the RL=1 flag

(C) To work around (B), telepathy-butterfly (which Empathy uses for MSN) should auto-detect whether the text should be RTL, and if so, set the RL=1 flag when it sends it to the MSN server

People who speak RTL languages: does that sound like a reasonable course of action?