Right-to-left and other languages

Deckwright lays out text with real shaping: Arabic letters join, Devanagari syllables combine and Chinese, Japanese and Korean text wraps between characters.

Arabic and other right-to-left decks

Open File → Templates… and choose Project plan in Arabic. The front matter says:

lang: ar
dir: rtl

lang: ar alone already switches the deck to right-to-left; dir is there to make it explicit. Titles, bullets, tables and footers are mirrored: bullets sit on the right, tables start from the right, numbered lists count from the right. Charts keep their usual axes because numbers read left to right.

The editor itself stays left-to-right so that Markdown symbols line up; the preview shows the real direction. Exports keep it: the PDF and HTML are right-to-left and PowerPoint paragraphs are marked as right-to-left.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean

Write your text and set lang: zh, ja or ko. Deckwright loads the matching Noto font when your deck contains these characters. The fonts are reduced to the everyday characters — the 3,755 most common hanzi, 2,965 common kanji with all kana, and all 2,350 common Hangul syllables — so the app stays fast.

If you use a rarer character, the yellow box below the preview lists it: some characters have no glyph in the embedded fonts, and lines with them fall back to a basic font in the PDF, which may not show them. Replace them with common forms where you can.

Mixed languages

A deck can mix scripts on one slide, for example an English talk with a Hindi quote. Set lang to the main language; screen readers use it for pronunciation.

Check it

Open the Check view: a deck without lang gets a note, and missing characters show up in the warnings.