Hebrew and RTL: what breaks and how to fix it

The basics

Declare language and direction at the document level. From there, use logical properties — start and end instead of left and right — for margins, borders and position. Every place left with explicit left is a future bug in the second version of the site.

Directional icons, like arrows, should flip. Non-directional ones, like a play symbol, shouldn't.

Mixed text

A line containing Hebrew, English and numbers is where direction gets confused. Punctuation at the end of a sentence jumps, version numbers flip, and web addresses break.

The fix is isolation: wrap a foreign or code segment in an element that declares its direction. That solves most cases without tricks.

Phone numbers, identifiers and technical strings are best displayed as explicit left-to-right, even inside a Hebrew sentence.

What else to check

Horizontal scroll and sliders, tables with numbered columns, charts whose axis should flip, and export to files — especially PDF, where Hebrew support often fails at the font level rather than the code level.