Show buttons to control text directionality in the Visual Editor

[RanYanivHartstein]

TinyMCE offers buttons to control text directionality. We are currently only showing these buttons for RTL languages - Arabic, Hebrew, etc.

This makes it easy to add LTR text in a mostly-RTL blog - a quote in English, for example.

However, no directionality buttons are shown for LTR blogs. To add an RTL section in an LTR blog, you have to use HTML.

I suggest we always show directionality buttons in the Kitchen Sink toolbar, so users will be able to control directionality regardless of their blog's language..

This is related to this ticket, about adding directionality buttons in the HTML editor: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/13070

I doubt the vast majority of LTR blogs would ever need to support RTL text. Couldn't they do <div style="direction:rtl">, or would that be stripped by kses? Seems like plugin material for anything LTR to RTL. RTL to LTR, on the other hand, seems like a good use case for the HTML editor.

Agree with @nacin. The number of LTR installs that would need these buttons doesn't warrant having them always shown. Best done with a simple plugin. Note that the 'directionality' MCE plugin is already included in core to support RTL installs so a WP plugin to load it on LTR installs would be couple lines of code.