Arabic Window Manager - Fvwm

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Its with great honor that I'd like to turn your attention to the
newly included ability of a window manager (sans Gnome and/or KDE)
that can display Arabic.  FVWM version-2.5.6+ (www.fvwm.org) can
display Arabic titles as well as render Arabic on its various
plug-in modules (FvwmWinList, FvwmPager, etc - read the man pages
for further help).

Fvwm, from what I read, also works and plays well with Gnome and has
the appropriate required hint bits (untested as I'm not a Gnome user).

Here are some crude screenshots (will be removed soon),

  http://fakkir.net/~nadim/temp/fvwm_NOarabic.png
  http://fakkir.net/~nadim/temp/fvwm_arabic.png

If you're interested in trying this - do the following,

 1. Download fvwm-2.5.6+ (www.fvwm.org)
 2. Make sure you have Arabic fonts (download 10x21; xset; ...)
 3. Ensure 'fribidi' is in your path (ie. 'which fribidi' ought
    to work) or configure with '--with-fribidi-bindir='
 4. make; make install
 5. Start fvwm without Arabic support and play a bit with it
 6. Now create your own 'rc' file with the appropriate font
    settings as well as your customized preferences,
     a. cp FVWM_DIR_PATH/sample.fvwmrc/system.fvwm2rc ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc
     b. include and specify your appropriate 10646 fonts in your
        ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc file

      For instance,

        MenuStyle * Font     YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE
        Style     * Font     YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE
        Style     * IconFont YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE

        *FvwmButtons: Font YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE
        *FvwmIdent:   Font YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE
        *FvwmPager:   Font YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE
        *FvwmWinList  Font YOUR_FONT_NAME_HERE

    Again, read each module's man page to see the various settings
    and exact syntax.

 7. Restart/Start fvwm anew and invoke an xterm via,

    $ xterm -title "ARABIC UTF-8 TEXT HERE"

NOTE: Harakat don't seem to be rendered properly, I've reported
      this bug and will report it again since I got no replies to
      the 'fvwm at fvwm.org' mailing-list (voice your support to
      fix this bug on their list politely if you're interested :-)

        http://www.hpc.uh.edu/fvwm/archive/0302/msg00125.html

Enjoy and Salam

 - Nadim


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