Right to left support in templates

Platform renders text in document templates and mail templates from left to right (LTR). Unlike on application pages, Platform does not automatically set the text direction based on the language. However, you can edit your template content to render some or all text from right to left (RTL).

Document templates

For HTML document templates, you can override this behavior and render text RTL for the whole document, for individual elements, and within an element for a portion of the text. The following attribute and element enable this control:

  • The dir attribute — This attribute specifies the text direction. Its possible values are ltr, rtl, and auto, where auto renders the text based on the language. Add this attribute to an HTML element, such as a section or paragraph, to specify the text direction. For example, to render the entire document as RTL, add it to the html element: 
    <html dir=”rtl” >
  • The bdi element — This element isolates a part of text that might be formatted in a different direction from other text outside it. It is helpful when the user-generated content has an unknown direction. For example, if a parent element sets the dir attribute to rtl, and user-generated text could be in Spanish, using the bdi element ensures that the text is rendered in the appropriate direction.

For Microsoft Word document templates (DOC/DOCX), the default alignment is left. You can use the rich text editor to keep headings and other titles right aligned.

For XLS, XLSX, RTF, TXT, and XML document templates, you can align the text as required for the language.

Mail templates

To use RTL text in mail templates, do the following:

  • Set the email encoding to UTF-8 on the My Settings.
  • When creating a mail template, select HTML as the format. See Email templates for information about creating mail templates. Use the dir attribute and the bdi element as described above to format the text direction of the HTML content.

For more information about language support, see Language support.