Re: Waiting for QT3.0 or fixing current problems?

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 12:15:39AM +0300, Mandrake 8.1 User wrote:
> What's necessary at this time to support arabic on Linux?

Quite a bit of work. Have a look at our project list on:
  http://www.arabeyes.org/projects/project_list.txt

This will give you an idea of how much is still missing and needs to be done.
> 
> Is it fixing the problems with the current GUI applications to
> write/read arabic characters properly, and trying to at least viewing
> arabic sites and mails in Linux;

That is part of it. Qt3 still does not perfect its Arabic support. Trolltech has
been made aware of these issues and I presume are working on it. However, the last
time I reported my tests I did not get any replies back yet.

> OR
> Just trying to translate the KDE applications to work on QT 3.0 that

That is another missing piece. That is a long and challenging job, because it
involves a *lot* of translation that has not been approached by anyone until just
now.

> will just serve us with supporting right to lift languages but the same
> current issues (like arabic fonts renerding in
> konqueror/Netscape/Mozilla) will remain if we don't fix it?


The issues of Konqueror are a direct result of the Qt library. In the past,
Konqueror rendered Arabic beautifully but it was broken after the Qt3 updates. That
is because it did it's own bidi and Qt on top of that performed the bidi algorithm,
resulting in a double-bidi effect. I'm not sure if that has been resolved yet.

Mozilla has issues of its own, and so do most of the large packages that need to
have Arabic support. There is a lot of work that needs to be done, and enough room
for everyone to participate ;)

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| Mohammed Elzubeir                    | http://fakkir.net/           |
| Tech Support                         | http://www.arabeyes.org/     |
| College of Business Computing Center | Homepage:                    |
| University of North Texas            | http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/ |
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