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Re: Bayani status

Salam,

From: ayoub al othmany
Subject: Re: Bayani status
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:15:31 -0800 (PST)

Aîd Moubarak to all,
 Youcef,
  I'd like to congratulate you about the "terrific"
work you have been doing. Sorry for not participating
more these last days but i have problems with my
distro (slackware linux) to support arabic langUage.



Thank you :))
Don't be disappointed for not being able to participate now. There is a lot of things to be done (I can't manage to make such a HUGE job only by myself), and your help is/will be needed sooner or later :) But, just take your time :))


After many long hours of installing, reading and
googling, the result is almost rubbish ! (i manage to
get mltem working nevertheless).
So i have a simple question to all of you :
*Which* distro do you recommend for a full support of
arabic ?

Maybe this question has been already answered but i
acknowledge that i am to lazy to search the complete
mailing-list archives. However google gives no anwsers
(^_^).


I also compiled bayani on my linux but arabic fonts
are not displayed, though i installed all the fonts as
explained in www.arabeyes.org/howto/arabic-howto.en.
Actually, instead of characters, i get empy
rectangles.
Is it a hopeless case to have beautiful arabic letters
on my slackware linux ?

I hope this is not only the case with bayani :) Anyway, i think it has more to do with your XServer than with your distrib, but I may be worng. In fact, i use Mandrake 9.0 and I choose installation in arabic. So, it starts gnome directly in arabic but KDE still shows squares... I tried to install truetype fonts etc but the result is disappointing (you can see it on the bayani screenshots) and I'm too lazy to fix it.

I have one small remark about the french translation:
bayani is distributed in arabic, english and french.
If we look at things from french-speaking user's side,
i think we would not understand why the parser does
not support french language.

But as you said, maybe it is not the priority right
now. When we see all the work made and the result
obtained, the real thing to do is to publicize bayani.

I thought it would be better to use in the French version commands like 'newframe' rather than 'nouvellefenetre' to open a frame, since this terminolgy is nowadays familiar... But if you feel that it is better to do it in French than it wouldn't take more than 2 minutes to fix this :) Since I have to open the XML french translation file with QT linguist and translate the ~10 actual commands to french (the parser error messages etc are already in french).


I know that in one of your emails you have already
thought about that. I think we should focus on that
task. I am not an expert in adervertising techniques
but maybe the first thing to do is to contact
universities, schools, teachers, etc. What do you
think ?

I agree. I am waiting for a better release (maybe 0.2) to start advertising, since the changes we are talking about are in the CVS version only. I have to add autotools, correct bugs etc thus, people testing Bayani wouldn't be disappointed.

It also means that some tutorials must be made to help
people with using Bayani.

Yes, that's a priority. Actually, for example no one except me know how to use the command script unless they read the code. And since this is not expected from an end user, we have to document and make a nice help :)

As to your question about implementing a chadda and
arakat sensitive script language, i would suggest to
let users write arabic words without taking into
account that aspect. But actually, I am wondering if
this "add-on" to bayani  is not an attempt to make the
FIRST SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION SYSTEM IN ARABIC like
maple, mathematica, magma (my favourie one),...!!

Actually, you are the 3rd person suugesting this (not take shadda etc into account). So i think this is the tendency. I'll take this into account and i think that it wouldn't be difficult to change it if we find out later that it is not appropriate.

I don't know if Bayani is the "FIRST SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION SYSTEM IN ARABIC" but it is anyway in my goals to make an arabic, free mathematica clone (read this post and the replies to it http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/developer/2002/November/msg00064.html). Again, does anybody know about attempts/existing arabic symbolic computation/programming languages ? If no, we'll add "FIRST SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION SYSTEM IN ARABIC" to Bayani's publicity :)

Personnally I intensively use latex and I need to
import  gaphics mainly in eps format (it is just a
matter of taste). Bayani proposes only one type of
format file, the png format. I knwow that there are
tools that convert from png to anything else, but what
about integrating directly other file formats in
Bayani ?

I am also a regular LaTeX/Postscript user. To be frank, I first thought of bayani when i was thinking about writing scientific articles in arabic, so came the idea to have figures in arabic too. When bayani was a small Xlib app I wrote a function to save to EPS. Since bayani has eveolved, this function was not updated. QT permits to save into BMP/JPEG/PNG etc so I plan to add all those formats to bayani. So the user can save in his/her prefered format directly from bayani and not having to convert it later. I plan to add EPS/PS saving. If you are interested and you have some postscript language knowledge you can work on it if you like (it's totally your choice, i'm not forcing you :)). If you don't have any postscript language knowledge you can learn the necessry very quickly (less than one hour :)) since the only used concepts are points/lines/shapes and text drawing with postscript. I can give you the old xlib code and some references. Again, it is completely your choice :)

OK, this is the second time i write this message (I hope netscape will not 'core dump' again when i'll try to send it... crossing fingers :))

Salam,

Youcef.

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