VisualEditor/RTL support, GSoC 2013

= Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in VisualEditor =

Name and contact information
Name: Moriel Schottlender Email: moo@smarterthanthat.com IRC or IM networks/handle(s): mooeypoo Location: New York City (Originally Israel)

Synopsis
I propose working on a series of improvements to VisualEditor concentrating on support for RTL languages like Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Pashto. There is already a need to add this support and a large part of it is defined in the article "Bidirectional text requirements"

Possible Mentors
Amir E. Aharoni offered to co-mentor and James Forrester and  Inez Korczynski from VisualEditor has shown interest as well.

Deliverables

 * A toolbar button for changing language direction (similar to OpenOffice, Word and GoogleDocs)
 * Page-level and paragraph-level support for RTL languages
 * Inline support for RTL.
 * element support for element isolation in articles that contain more than one language
 * (Investigation) Develop a language inspector
 * (Investigation) Keyboard support for changing direction with Control-Shift

Roadmap
Stage 1:
 * Familiarize myself with VisualEditor and its components and plugins
 * Investigate common RTL issues
 * Studying the RTL/Bidirectional issues in Mediawiki Bugzilla Bug 745 - RTL/bidirectional issues
 * Investigate available RTL solutions in other javascript-based editors (if exists)

Stage 2:
 * Add a toolbar button for directionality
 * Add and test page-level RTL/LTR switching support for multiple browsers
 * Begin work on inline-support and paragraph-support
 * Investigate test cases of RTL issues and common problems
 * Investigate the implementation of tag support

Stage 3:
 * Implement paragraph- and inline- support
 * TEST TEST TEST! Verify RTL works for regular and fringe cases
 * Produce documentation for future development
 * (Investigation) Add keyboard-support if possible; Control-Shift to switch directionality

About you
I am originally from Israel, now living in New York City while I get my Masters in Computer Science. My bachelor's is in Physics, and I'm quite passionate about the link between the two!

Being a native Hebrew speaker, RTL support is a recurring issue that's definitely close to my heart and I'd love to contribute to the community and help improving it.

Participation
I'd love to work with the VisualEditor team as well as with the internationalization team, as this is a project that touches both. A huge group that already deals with many of the RTL issues would be the MediaWiki/he.

I plan to update my blog with status reports and my MediaWiki user page with updates, test cases, proposed solutions and walkthroughs.

Contributions
I have started submitting bug fixes to MediaWiki and extensions, including VisualEditor:
 * Fixed: Bug 47717 - VisualEditor: Link inspector input text always has LTR direction}: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/61960/
 * Fixed: Bug 36032 - The reference number should be bidi-isolated: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/61634/
 * Fixed: Bug 45585 - Keyboard Icon of Language selector for RTL languages should be at left: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/61749/ (Submitted to GitHub repository for jQuery.IME)

Past open source experience
I've worked with Javascript and jQuery before quite extensively. One of the main side-projects I've been working on is a Metro UI Windows 8 app (Javascript/HTML5) and I've created a couple of small jQuery-based tools. I've also worked with php and programmed a couple of extension to small CMS systems. These are available on my GitHub page.

Any other info
I will be fully available for GSoC work through the summer. I will take a summer course, but it will only be twice a week, and since I work during weekends as well, I will more than compensate for the lost time.

I used to work full-time job with a much higher course-load (during a full semester), so this summer-course should not interfere with the project.

Comment: I am an International Student (work through CPT) and my summer vacation officially ends around September 1st. International students have slightly different work-related laws; we are allowed to work 40-hours a week during semester breaks, but only 20-hours a week during a semester, and only with special approval. I hope this will not be a problem.