A Quick RTL Refresher

Most of the world’s languages are written left-to-right. So, in this paragraph, you read the letters and words starting from the left edge of a line across to the right edge.

Arabic and Hebrew, among others, are written right-to-left. The abbreviation “RTL” refers to these languages. LTR, in turn, refers to left-to-right languages.

Android supports both LTR and RTL. We noted in the chapter introducing the manifest how your app can advertise that it supports RTL. This, in turn, will cause you to refer to “start” and “end” instead of “left” and “right” when positioning widgets on the screen:

In general, we want the GUI to flow with the language direction. Things that you might have on the left with an LTR language usually go on the right with an RTL language, and so forth.