Right to left tooltip text c#

Question

Using WinForms, I have a string which I want to set into a ToolTip. The string is separated by lines with Environment.NewLine, like so:

x.ToolTipText = "aaaaaa" + Environment.NewLine + "bbb";

when this string is set to the ToolTip it looks:

aaaaaa
bbb

But my problem is when I want it to be localized to Arabic and ToolTip does not support the default RightToLeft property, so it looks very bad. I want it to look like:

aaaaaa
   bbb

Also: String.PadLeft does not help!

Any idea?

Is this an asp.net tooltip (i.e. on an html control) or is this a winforms tooltip? — Abel, Nov 25 '09 at 11:25
If it can't be adjusted you can try to use a ugly way with adding spaces — RvdK, Nov 25 '09 at 11:28

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 25 '09 at 14:52

Second try. Didn't manage to get the previous solution attempt to behave correctly. Found an alternate way by rendering the tooltip using a custom draw method.

Setup the controls:

string tip = "aaaaaa" + Environment.NewLine + "bbb";           
toolTip1.OwnerDraw = true;
toolTip1.Draw += toolTip1_Draw;
toolTip1.SetToolTip(textBox1, tip);

Handle the draw event:

private void toolTip1_Draw(object sender, DrawToolTipEventArgs e)
{
    e.Graphics.FillRectangle(SystemBrushes.Info, e.Bounds);
    e.DrawBorder();           
    e.DrawText(TextFormatFlags.RightToLeft | TextFormatFlags.Right);
}

PHeiberg · Answer 2 · 2009-11-25T11:48:14.930

3

If it's windows forms I guess you have to rely on the unicode control characters to mark the tooltip text as RTL.

string myToolTipText = "aaaaaa"+Environment.newLine+"bbb";
char rle_char = (char)0x202B;// RLE embedding 
control.RightToLeft = RightToLeft.Yes;
control.ToolTipText = rle_char + myToolTipText;

Check this blog for more information on authoring RTL applications.

If it's a web application you can check the w3c authoring RTL applications guidelines. Basically it comes down to the same solution as for windows forms, adding RLE chars.

edited Nov 25 '09 at 11:48

answered Nov 25 '09 at 11:42

PHeiberg

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I unfortunately didn't have time to test it out, so I trusted the blog. Found another solution that I managed to get to work. I posted in a new reply. – PHeiberg Nov 25 '09 at 14:53

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 25 '09 at 14:52

3

The ToolTip control already supports this. The key is that the control for which you display the tip has a right-to-left layout. This example form demonstrates this:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 {
    public partial class Form1 : Form {
        ToolTip mTip = new ToolTip();
        public Form1() {
            InitializeComponent();
            this.RightToLeft = RightToLeft.Yes;
            this.RightToLeftLayout = true;
        }
        protected override void OnMouseDown(MouseEventArgs e) {
            mTip.Show("Hi\nthere", this);
        }
    }
}

answered Nov 25 '09 at 14:52

Hans Passant

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Just curious, but how does that work with mixed RTL / LTR text? – Abel Nov 26 '09 at 00:00
This does not work if only RightToLeft = RightToLeft.Yes is set. I did not test with RightToLeftLayout = true which I cannot use in my application. – Elmue Aug 29 '21 at 19:36

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 25 '09 at 23:59

0

Just some general thoughts to give an idea about what's going on: the tooltip class does not draw text like a multiline textbox. The whole tool-tip is considered one line without a binding rectangle, hence RTL vs LTR have no meaning (other then the order of characters within the text).

Result: using normal right-to-left or left-to-right switches either with Unicode RTL codepoints or otherwise, won't help when it comes to aligning: none is applied.

One way out is (ab)using a TextBox and place it nicely over the place of the tooltip. But others have shown prettier ways with owner-drawn tooltips, which is definitely the way to go.

answered Nov 25 '09 at 23:59

Abel

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This answer is defintely wrong. A tooltip text may contain linebreaks which are displayed correctly by Windows. A tooltip is NOT considered "one line". – Elmue Aug 29 '21 at 19:30
@Elmue, this was back in 2009..., but yeah, it's vague. I think I didn't mean to imply that tooltips cannot _show_ multiple lines (by virtue of using the crlf characters), but that its default behavior is not tailored for bi-drectional stuff. As the top answer showed, you can get the handle of the tooltip and change this behavior, but only for the whole window. It just won't listen to [Unicode RTL marks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark) etc, disallowing inline bi-directional text. – Abel Oct 18 '21 at 16:59

Right to left tooltip text c#

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