Opera Arabic bug

Opera 7.21 and Opera 7.23 seem to get confused by the Arabic characters on the Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki Main Pages.

The Arabic characters are put a long way over to the right, and a long underscore character makes the page extremely wide. it must be something to do with left-to-right vs right-to-left text.

Matthewmayer 19:29, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It looks fine for me in Opera 7.21 on FreeBSD and also on Windows XP with 7.23. What OS version are you using? --Brion VIBBER 23:37, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Another user confirms display problem with Opera 7.22 and 7.23 on Windows 2000 SP3. --Brion VIBBER 00:12, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Windows ME Matthewmayer 17:20, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I get it on Opera 7.20 (build 3144) on XP-pro. Opera 6.01 (build 1041) on the same machine is hunky-dory, as is Netscape Communicator 4.8 (with bad rendering of several "foreign" fonts), Amaya 7.2, IE6, mozilla 1.5-rc?(20030916). So it looks like the conjunction of certain (known troublemaker) versions of the opera rendering engine, winXP, and perhaps the alignment of Pluto. -- Finlay McWalter

Opera 7.23 on the same machine above is broken too. Perhaps there's some connection to which system font is actually used to render arabic on a given windows machine (which might explain why some folks with the same browser version don't see the problem). -- Finlay McWalter

My goofing around with different arabic default fonts didn't do anything. But I also goofed around with a local copy of the homepage. Removing the arabic characters altogether fixed things fine. On trying to put them back in incrementally, I had the body of the "arabic" link read "He ‮ llo" (there's the single char 8238 in there, btw) - which (rather amusingly) turns the remainder of the paragraph into R->L mode (backward letter ordering and selection behaviour). So I think we can safely say "Opera 7.2+ is broken for many people on windows when handling arabic characters". -- Finlay McWalter

And yes, the above comment is also in crazy-backward mode in Opera 7.23 for me. -- Finlay McWalter

It also looks fine in Opera 7.23 (build 518) (qt-shared) on Redhat-9. -- Finlay McWalter

Broken here with Opera 7.23 on Win 98 SE. It started 3 days ago, when I upgraded from Opera 7.10. Here the Opera people say that bidirectional text implementation (Arabic, Hebrew) was something new in 7.20. –Hjr 02:00, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I have Windows XP, Opera 7.22, and I too get the long underscore thing. I have submitted this bug to opera, hopefully they will fix it. - Lord Kenneth

I've got a test box with Windows 98 now that does exhibit the bug. Confirmed that it's present in Opera 7.50 beta release 1. --Brion VIBBER 23:31, 24 Jan 2004 (PST)