I know it has been a while since this was first brought up, by I would like to jump in and add some different perspective on the issue.
I know you tried doing your best with this feature, and that relying on an international standards may seem like the best way forward.
But, well, I don’t have a better way to say it - the international standards are wrong. I don’t know how they were formulated, but they clearly missed something when they tried to decide on the functionality required by RTL languages.
I know how it sounds, and that it’s eassy to dismiss this kind of ctiticism. But I have had alot of experience with this, and I’m very confident when I say - auto detection based on the first character is not enough.
If you look more closely into it, you will see that the apps that have good RTL user experience never rely on this, or that there are community plugins for the apps that add the required functionality.
Finding such apps is a real struggle. And you are not alone in relying on theae standards that look good but don’t acctually deliver.
There are many apps that rely on direction auto detections (notion, remnote etc), and they all have the same problem as you.
And I do not use them. And it seems to me like others don’t use them either.
I think that you should look at text editors when designing this feature (or any other feature related to RTL). Because Obsidian is to some degree a text editor. Or rather it contains a text editor.
Text editors like Word and Google Docs have solved this problem years ago, and everyome seems happy with them. I don’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel here.
I personally use OneNote only for that reason. I tried obsedian many times, and everytime (includimg after teh release of this feature) I discovered that I simply could not write what I wanted. And that’s a problem, because it’s and app used for writing and orgenizing notes. It cannot do without the writing part.
As to the Left-to-Write marks. I tried to use them, and I could not figure out how. And even if I could, I don’t think they are a viable solution. Using the is just very unatural, and really hurts the writing experince. Writing should be eassy. This is not eassy.
I suggest that you try and talk to some RTL users, it seems like there are many people who are more than happy to engage with you and help in the design process. I think you shoudn’t try to guess what we want. Just ask us. You cannot replace talking to us with checking stuff online, relying on standards and looking at what others have done in the past. If you do that, you will just get the same results as other apps, and most other apps suck.
How do I think this should work: Ideally, this should copy most functionality of text editors (Word etc). For starters, I this the most importamt thing is allowing to align text eassaly. I think the way to do it is by introducing the standart Shift+CTRL shortcut for changing the text alignmemt. If you want to use invisible markers behind the scenes that’s fine.
This will drastically improve the user experience.
Thank you for your time.
I hope this was helpfull.