A while ago I added RTL text support to my wiki:

http://ikiwiki.info/tips/Right-to-left___40__RTL__41___page_text

But this support does not work with PO files. When I write a page in English, I need the Hebrew/Arabic translation to have additional text (in my case, using the template directive) which causes the direction of the text to be RTL.

I saw a recent patch which claims to solve the problem by exposing the language code and direction to the templates (which would help a lot), but when I go to the original website from which it came, it looks like the Arabic text is still aligned LTR just like English:

http://addons.nvda-project.org/index.ar.html

Another issue is that I use Debian stable, and I'm not sure it's safe to use some unstable ikiwiki (currently I use the version from backports) - advice welcome :-)

It's still important to have the ability to change direction inside the page, but the default direction specified either in CSS on in the page.tmpl file should be dynamic. I didn't check how the PO plugin works, but it may be necessary to update there, because if all it does is copy the HTML page and switch strings with translations, it must be modified to also edit the LTR/RTL directives so that different translations of the same page can have different directions.

I hope I'll have some time to look into it myself, I'm just a bit behind now with non-recent ikiwiki version (maybe it's time for me to try sid or from source).

--fr33domlover