The goal of rtlr is to help you print correctly right-to-left text in
the console and in plots. It was motivated by this Stack
Overflow question from 2018. As of now, its main and only function
is str_rtl(), which wraps a string with RTL-embedding
Unicode characters.
You can install rtlr from CRAN with:
install.packages("rtlr)Alternatively, you can install the development version of rtlr from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("matanhakim/rtlr")This is a basic example of fixing an RTL issue when writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is written right-to-left, so punctuation marks (such as “,” or “.”) should come at the left side, i.e. the end, of a sentance.
library(rtlr)
x <- "הנקודה צריכה להיות בסוף המשפט."
# `x` says in Hebrew:
# "the dot should come at the end of the sentance."
cat(x)
#> הנקודה צריכה להיות בסוף המשפט.
cat(str_rtl(x))
#> הנקודה צריכה להיות בסוף המשפט.Notice how the dot ends up in the left side, where it should be.
You can also use it in plots, for example:
library(ggplot2)
#> Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 4.2.2
theme_update(text = element_text(size = 20))
p <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl))) +
geom_bar()
p +
labs(
x = "اسطوانات!"
# `x` in `labs()` says "cylinders!" in Arabic.
)
Notice how the exclamation mark is on the right-hand side, but it
should be on the left, as Arabic is another right-to-left language. use
str_rtl() to solve it, like this:
p +
labs(
x = str_rtl("اسطوانات!")
# `x` in `labs()` says in Arabic:
# "cylinders!"
)
Now the exclamation mark is on the left-hand side, like it should.
Additionally, sometimes you wish to break up lines within a plot. The
easiest way to do it is by pasting \n, but this results yet
again with a problem in the location of non-RTL characters. Notice how
the parentheses on the top row of x in labs()
are correctly placed on the left side, but the parentheses on the bottom
row are wrongly placed on the right side.
p +
labs(
x = paste0(
"اسطوانات! (عدد المكابس)",
"\n",
"عام (2023)"
)
# `x` in `labs()` says in Arabic:
# "cylinders! (The number of pistons)"
# "Year (2023)"
)
This can be easily solved with str_rtl() and
multiline = TRUE:
p +
labs(
x = str_rtl(
"اسطوانات! (عدد المكابس)",
"عام (2023)",
multiline = TRUE
)
# `x` in `labs()` says in Arabic:
# "cylinders! (The number of pistons)"
# "Year (2023)"
)
A common use case for this is in the caption of a plot, where sometimes you have to write a lot of text regarding the source of the data and the copyrights. When you don’t notice, you can easily overflow:
p +
labs(
x = str_rtl(
"اسطوانات! (عدد المكابس)",
"عام (2023)",
multiline = TRUE
),
# `x` in `labs()` says in Arabic:
# "cylinders! (The number of pistons)"
# "Year (2023)"
caption = "מקור המידע: טבלה מובנית של נתוני מכוניות. עיבוד: מתן חכים. יש להקפיד על הצגת טקסט מימין לשמאל."
# `caption` says in Hebrew:
# "Source of data: a built-in data frame of car data. Analysis: Matan Hakim."
# "You should insist on showing your text right-to-left."
)
We have two problems here:
This can again be easily solved using the
multiline = TRUE argument:
p +
labs(
x = str_rtl(
"اسطوانات! (عدد المكابس)",
"عام (2023)",
multiline = TRUE
),
# `x` in `labs()` says in Arabic:
# "cylinders! (The number of pistons)"
# "Year (2023)"
caption = str_rtl(
"מקור המידע: טבלה מובנית של נתוני מכוניות. עיבוד: מתן חכים.",
"יש להקפיד על הצגת טקסט מימין לשמאל.",
multiline = TRUE
)
# `caption` says in Hebrew:
# "Source of data: a built-in data frame of car data. Analysis: Matan Hakim."
# "You should insist on showing your text right-to-left."
)
Notice how the lines are split with no overflow, and how the final dot is placed on the left side, where it should be.