Re: Reading arabic on linux

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 12:36:26PM -0800, N. Heer wrote:
> Jens,
> 
> 	If I were you I'd just use lynx with acon on the console.  There

Or 'Akka' for that matter -- http://www.arabeyes.org/projects/akka.php

It is Acon re-incarnated, rewritten etc.

> is a program called Arazilla for X and another called AraMosaic, but
> neither seems to work very well at least for me.  You don't need the

AraMosaic can't do a _lot_ of things. For instance, you can't have something
like -- http://www.linux.org.sa/ (it doesn't like the country codes).. don't
use it or waste your time on it.

> problem is that most Arabic web sites are written only for Internet
> Explorer 5 or above.

Back to the original question, Galeon uses Mozilla's rendering libraries and
pretty much embeds mozilla (don't understand why not just use Mozilla).
Anyhow, its Arabic support is weak, and far from usable.

Knoqueror on the other hand offerered excellent Arabic support but is
currently broken because it does its own bidi inside the khtml engine. Now
when they switched everything over to Qt3 which does all the bidi for
everything, Konqueror has a double-bidi effect, which again renders it
useless. 

So.. all that being said, your best bet is to wait a little for Konqueror to
get patched and ready to go. Mozilla doesn't look like it's going to have
their Arabic support usable anytime soon.

As for the 'vowels' question. No, I am not aware of any program that does for
you, but that sounds like an AI project ;) Specially that all the 'tashkeel'
would have to be decided not only after the syntactical level but semantic
too.


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