Farsi (and right-to-left scripts) in FLEx

I needed to be able to examine the structure of some Farsi metaphorical expressions, and I was curious to see how well FLEx would handle the script directionality problem.  I also don't know very much Farsi, so I wanted the program to help me understand the grammar and lexicon better.

In general, the answer seems to be very well.  In the screenshot below, we see that the Farsi text is aligned to the right edge for the Arabic script.  But the Free translation in English operates in a normal left-to-right order:

We can see in this example that the suffix -ra 'accusative' follows the word jamea 'society'.  It is correctly characterized as a suffix in the system.

I set up a lexicon with two writing systems for Farsi -- one ordinary (Arabic script) and one phonetic (Roman script).  The two have different directionalities.  The lexical entry has both types of script:

In the interlinear text, you can also display the phonetic under the Arabic, but you have to read it right-to-left:

So the pronunciation of the first example is (approximately) 'Faqar jamea-ra pashan kar-da'.  That is a little weird at first, but I can't think of how else you could align the entries in the two writing systems.

It would also be possible to enter the Farsi text in transcription (l-to-r), but there's not much advantage to that, since then you can't cut and past ordinary Farsi into a next text without first transcribing it.  Especially if you are learning the language, this is not straightforward, since Farsi phonology and script can be divergent.