Document direction

FrameMaker allows you to author documents in both left-to-right (LTR) as well as right-to-left (RTL) scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi. You can also choose to You can also choose to author multi-directional documents. This means that you can author a document in a specific direc­tion that includes parts authored in the other direction. For example, you can author a document in a LTR script such as English that includes paragraphs (see Paragraph Designer) and tables (see Change the direction of text in table) authored in RTL scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi. Or you can author a multi-flow document contains one flow (text frame) in an LTR language and another flow in an RTL language. For details, see Set flow direction.

Document containing text authored in LTR (English) and RTL (Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi) scripts

Besides the text in a document, you can also change the orientation (flip) of the images in a docu­ment based on the direction of the document (see Change direction of document containing objects). You can add multi-directional text lines to the images in your documents (see Add a text line to a graphic).

You can define a mini TOC in a FrameMaker document in which the direction either LTR or RTL.

You can also copy and paste such text to and from FrameMaker documents (see Import Microsoft Word files).

note:  When you import or copy text of a specific direction into a FrameMaker document, you need to ensure the text direction of the destination location (document, table, or paragraph) is set to the same direction.

FrameMaker provides out-of-the-box document direction support for both unstructured docu­ments (see Set the direction of a document) and DITA topics (see Change text direction). However, for structured documents based on other structured applications, the application developer will need to define the dir property in the EDD. For details, see the Structured applications reference guide.