MarsEdit 3.3.5: Right To Left

October 26th, 2011

MarsEdit 3.3.5 is out with a few small fixes, and a new feature to better support bloggers who write in right-to-left (RTL) languages. The update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page and from the Mac App Store.

A new per-blog setting lets you specify whether the text in a post should tend towards RTL. When this is set, MarsEdit’s rich text editor will show paragraphs with a RTL orientation, without altering the underlying HTML markup. This is based on the assumption that RTL blogs use CSS rules in the blog theme to impose the RTL directionality by default.

Image of MarsEdit's per-blog text direction setting interface

I’ve beta-tested the directionality changes with a few native writers of RTL languages, and they seem satisfied with the solution as it avoids them having to manually change each paragraph’s direction while writing. If you are a RTL writer and you think I’ve done something wrong in the implementation, please be sure to let me know.

Complete change list for 3.3.5:

  • Support a new per-blog setting for default writing direction, to benefit right-to-left language bloggers
  • Change default keyboard shortcut for full screen toggle to cmd-ctrl-F, the standard for Mac OS X
  • Prevent a crash that could occur with some systems like Sina.com that return empty string instead of expected array
  • Fixes to make uploaded images target the desired blog more reliably
  • Fix a bug that prevented “Send to Blog” button from being clickable after launching from bookmarklet