Re: Fwd: Adding Arabic support to Ark Linux

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <alarfaj0 at yahoo dot com>]

--- Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> Bero, I'm forwarding this on your behalf to solicit a wider response, do
> please check the mailing-list archives for any replies if you opt not to
> subscribe to the 'general' list.
> 
>   http://www.arabeyes.org/mailinglists.php
> 
> Sorry for the delay.
> 
>  - Nadim
[...]

> From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero at arklinux dot org>
> To: contact at arabeyes dot org
> Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:22:39 +0200
> Subject: Adding Arabic support to Ark Linux
> 
> Hi,
> we'd like to add support for Arabic to Ark Linux (http://www.arklinux.org/).
> Unfortunately none of us has a clue about Arabic - so we have a couple of 
> questions:
> - You offer several Arabic fonts for download - do we need all of them, or
>   are all but one optional? [We're trying to keep our base install small, so
>   unless they're needed, we'd pick 1 or 2 fonts for the base install and put
>   the rest on an add-on CD - same we're doing for all the extra iso-8859-1
>   fonts]

One mono-space font and one regular font should be fine. Try to pick one thats
not too fancy and decorative. ae_AlMohannad would seem like a good choice.

> - Is there anything special we have to do to get right-to-left support, or
>   does the current KDE [3.3.1] take care of this by itself? Do we have to
>   add any libraries?

No, Fribidi is absolutely necessary. You will be happy to know that Fribidi
isn't Arabic-specific. If you include Fribidi then Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and
Urdu will all have proper RTL support.

> - How do you input Arabic characters? Do you have "normal" keyboards,
>   or do you need an IM (like Chinese or Japanese)? If the latter, what's IM
>   would you recommend?

Thankfully Arabic doesn't require any IM. I just type "setxkbmap ar" and start
typing away.

> - Our installer is built with Qt/Embedded - is there any Arabic support for
>   this? (Just displaying the characters is enough, we don't need any text
>   input during installation)

I think its supported but I'm not sure. Anyone?

> Thanks

And thanks to you for including Arabic :-)


		
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