Fwd: Re: Wine, Bidi, and Arabic

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Wine, Bidi, and Arabic
Date: Wednesday 08 January 2003 07:57
From: Shachar Shemesh <arabeyes at sun dot consumer dot org dot il>
To: Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>

Hi Isam,

I have not heard from you after my last email. I hope all is well.

The current status is that Wine should display Arabic more or less
(well, more less than more, but quite readable anyways) in the right
order. There is no joining or glyphing support as of yet. There is not
likely to be either unless Behdad puts it into FriBiDi, or you get me
someone to do it in Wine (or at least QA it). In any case, I'm talking
about somewhat long-term, as there are bigger problems to handle than
even the proper reordering. There is also some chance the IBM will
(finally) release their patch (partial though it is).

There is one thing that does need doing to get Arabic to work, though.
You absolutely need to define an Arabic keyboard in Wine. This
essentially involves editing dlls/x11drv/keyboard.c to include an Arabic
keyboard layout. Without this change you will not be able to type Arabic
characters.

I have talked to Jeremy White, CEO of Code Weavers. Someone called
"Hetz" is actively pushing them to add support for Hebrew Office 2K to
CrossOver office. I find it very hard to believe that Arabic is too far
behind, but the whole deal will only go through if he feels there is
enough market there to justify the extra work. We could sure use your
help in creating demand for this.

I'm hoping to be able to cooperate in order to bring the open source
solutions to as many people as possible.

                Shachar

Isam Bayazidi wrote:
>Salam Mr. Shachar,
>  I am Isam Bayazidi, a member in Arabeyes team (www.arabeyes.org) that
> works in Adding Arabic support to Open Source programs in Linux. I recently
> got note about your efforts in adding Bidi and Hebrew support for WINE, and
> would like to know and follow the progress of your work, and know how much
> would be needed to have Arabic in WINE ?
>  Last time I heard you thought of using fribidi .. was it adopted ?
>
>  I am interested into getting Arabic into WINE and as you know your efforts
>are the needed steps toward Arabic support ( BiDi and UNICODE ) ..
>
>  Please feel free to join the #arabeyes channel in the irc.openprojects.net
>server hoping to have the chance to discuss this issue with you .. my nick
>would be isam .. kuru and nadim may also me in the channel, and we would
> like to see Arabic there :-)
>
>Later

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