Tutorial by Examples

RTL (Right-to-left) support is an essential part in planning for i18n and L10n. Unlike English language which is written from left to right, many languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, etc. are written from right to left. To appeal to a more global audience, it is a good idea to plan your layouts ...

Starting SDK 17 (Android 4.2), RTL support was added in Android layouts and is an essential part of localization. Going forward, the left/right notation in layouts should be replaced by start/end notation. If, however, your project has a minSdk value less than 17, then both left/right and start/end ...

To test if the layouts that have been created are RTL compatible, do the following : Go to Settings -> Developer options -> Drawing -> Force RTL layout direction Enabling this option would force the device to use RTL locales and you can easily verify all parts of the app for RTL suppo...

The first step for coding for localization is to create default resources. This step is so implicit that many developers do not even think about it. However, creating default resources is important because if the device runs on an unsupported locale, it would load all of its resources from the defau...

To provide translations in other languages (locales), we need to create a strings.xml in a separate folder by the following convention : res/values-<locale>/strings.xml An example for the same is given below: In this example, we have default English strings in the file res/values/string...

Creating language specific layouts is often unnecessary if you have specified the correct start/end notation, as described in the earlier example. However, there may be situations where the defaults layouts may not work correctly for certain languages. Sometimes, left-to-right layouts may not transl...