Background
TextView always had issues with RTL (Right-To-Left) languages. Since I know only how to read Hebrew (in addition to English), I will talk about its issues:
Text alignment (and I'm not talking about gravity) . As an RTL language, Hebrew puts words from right to left (compared to English which is the opposite).
For demonstrating how annoying it is, imagine that instead of showing "Hello world." you usually get ".Hello world" . This could be easily fixed if you had it in a single sentence, but it's harder when there are multiple punctuations characters.
Vowels positions. Hebrew doesn't require vowels in order to read text, but sometimes it's very hard to read without them (especially the bible). For vowels, Hebrew has what is called "NIKUD", which are actually like dots inside the letters. The problem in Android was that they were usually positioned in the wrong location .
For demonstrating how annoying it is, imagine that instead of showing "Hello world." you usually get ".eHlol owrld" . Even if you try to fix it (put the vowels always one character after the current one), the position in the letter wasn't correct (imagine that the "e" in "Hello" would be like above the "H", for example) .
Only on version 4.2 (read here, under "Native RTL support") , Google has fixed all of the Hebrew related issues (or at least it seems so).
The problem
the problems with Hebrew has caused each Israeli carrier and each custom ROM maker have its own solution of how to fix the different issues, which makes it practically impossible to handle RTL text on pre 4.2 devices.
Things can get even more frustrating in case the text include both Hebrew and English letters.
What I've tried
I've read many websites talking about those problems, and I've tried many variants of the solutions, none has solved the problem on all devices:
Some suggest to put the character '\u200F' (or '\u202D') at the end/start/both of the text.
Some suggest using Html.fromHtml() method and put something special there.
Some even suggest to use the WebView instead (and maybe use WebSettings.setDefaultTextEncodingName() ).
The question
Is there a definite solution for this problem?
I would assume the best thing is that because Android 4.2 solves this, and Android is open source, we should have its TextView imported into a library that we can use, but Google hasn't provided such a library yet.