เลย์เอาต์ RTL และการจัดการทิศทาง

Languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu read right-to-left (RTL). A UI built only for left-to-right (LTR) feels broken to those users: back arrows point the wrong way, text aligns to the wrong edge, and rows appear mirrored.

• Goal: the entire layout should mirror when the locale is RTL.
• Flutter handles most of this automatically through a concept called directionality.
• Your job is to write direction-aware code instead of hard-coding left and right.

In this lesson you will learn how Flutter resolves direction and how to keep your widgets mirroring correctly.

At the core of RTL support is the TextDirection enum from dart:ui. It has exactly two values: ltr and rtl.

• Every text-rendering and direction-aware widget needs a TextDirection to lay out.
• In a real app it is normally derived from the device locale, but it is just a plain enum you can reason about in pure Dart.

Here is a tiny pure-Dart model that mirrors how Flutter picks a start edge from a direction.

In Flutter, the ambient text direction is provided by the Directionality widget. It sits high in the tree (usually inside MaterialApp) and exposes a direction to all descendants.

• Widgets read it with Directionality.of(context).
• MaterialApp automatically wraps your app in a Directionality based on the current locale.
• You rarely create one yourself, except in tests or to force a subtree's direction.

Forcing a subtree to RTL is as simple as wrapping it.

The single most important rule for RTL-safe layouts: think in start/end, not left/right.

• start = leading edge (left in LTR, right in RTL)
• end = trailing edge (right in LTR, left in RTL)

Flutter gives you direction-aware versions of common APIs that resolve automatically:

• EdgeInsetsDirectional instead of EdgeInsets
• AlignmentDirectional instead of Alignment
• BorderRadiusDirectional instead of BorderRadius

If you use these, your padding and alignment flip automatically when the direction changes.

To build intuition, here is how a directional inset resolves to physical left/right depending on direction. Flutter does this internally; modeling it in plain Dart makes the rule concrete.

• In LTR: start -> left, end -> right.
• In RTL: start -> right, end -> left.

Run this to see the same logical insets produce mirrored physical insets.

A plain Row is already direction-aware. Its children are laid out from start to end, so the visual order flips in RTL without any extra code.

• In LTR a Row of [A, B, C] shows A on the left.
• In RTL the same Row shows A on the right.

This is why you should let widgets like Row, ListTile, and AppBar do the mirroring for you instead of manually positioning children.

Below, the leading icon and trailing chevron of a ListTile swap sides automatically.

Some icons are inherently directional: back arrows, chevrons, and the send arrow should point toward the end of the reading direction.

• Material provides mirrored variants, e.g. Icons.arrow_back has Icons.arrow_back_ios and the auto-mirroring Icons.arrow_back behaves well in BackButton.
• For custom directional icons, wrap them so they flip in RTL using Transform.flip based on the resolved direction.

Reading the ambient direction lets you decide whether to mirror.

For text, prefer TextAlign.start and TextAlign.end over TextAlign.left and TextAlign.right.

• TextAlign.start aligns to the left in LTR and to the right in RTL.
• A single mixed-direction string (Arabic with embedded English) is handled by the text engine's bidi algorithm, but the paragraph's base direction comes from the ambient Directionality.

Using start means your form labels and body text align to the correct edge in every locale.

The cleanest way to verify mirroring is to render the same subtree twice under each direction. Wrapping a widget in Directionality overrides the ambient value for that subtree only.

• Great for widget tests and for a debug preview screen.
• You can also flip the whole app by setting locale to an RTL locale like Locale('ar').

This helper builds an RTL preview of any child.

Most RTL bugs come from hard-coded sides. Watch for these:

• EdgeInsets.only(left: 16) stays on the left even in RTL. Use EdgeInsetsDirectional.only(start: 16).
• Alignment.centerLeft does not flip. Use AlignmentDirectional.centerStart.
• Positioned(left: 0) in a Stack does not mirror. Use PositionedDirectional(start: 0).
• Hard-coded TextAlign.left for body text.

Rule of thumb: if an API has a Directional sibling, prefer it.

Sometimes your business logic needs the direction too, for example to choose a swipe gesture or an animation slide offset. Read it once and branch on a clean enum.

• Compute a sign: +1 for LTR, -1 for RTL, then multiply offsets.
• Keep this logic pure so it is easy to unit test.

This pure-Dart helper shows the pattern you would call with the resolved direction from Directionality.of(context).

You need a left padding in LTR that becomes right padding in RTL, automatically.

You learned how Flutter handles right-to-left layouts:

• TextDirection (ltr/rtl) drives everything; Directionality provides it to the tree, and Directionality.of(context) reads it.
• Think in start/end, not left/right. Prefer EdgeInsetsDirectional, AlignmentDirectional, BorderRadiusDirectional, and PositionedDirectional.
• Row, ListTile, and most Material widgets mirror automatically; let them.
• Use TextAlign.start for text, and mirror inherently directional custom icons.
• Verify by wrapping subtrees in a forced Directionality or running under an RTL locale like Locale('ar').

Avoid hard-coded sides and your UI will feel native to RTL users with almost no extra work.