Re: Arabic text entry

[Dave Weaver <davew at wsieurope dot com>]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 08:29, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> --- "Weaver, Dave" <davew at wsieurope dot com> wrote:
> > Can anyone point me in the right direction; where can I go for advice on
> > adding Arabic text input into this software? What resources are available for
> > a novice such as me?
> 
> This will really be hard to do without using or looking at the code in
> question.  Else your best bet is to find something that uses the same
> libraries that does have Arabic support to see how/what they've done to
> get that functionality.


The application uses OpenMotif 2.2.3, using XmCreateTextField() to
create the actual widget. Somehow I need to 'tweak' the code to enable
Arabic input. Unfortunately Motif isn't my area of expertise and I've
been unable to find documentation to help me get right-to-left input
working.

I've discovered Fribidi, and suspect this will help, but integrating it
with the Motif text widget looks like being a challenge.

To complicate matters, the text input widget is currently 'ignoring' any
Arabic characters I type.

Are there any Motif programmers here that can offer me any advice on
where I need to look to deal with right-to-left text input?

> 
> > I have been handed an Arabic keyboard, but don't even know how it's used in
> > practice; how does one switch between Arabic text entry and the normal (to
> > me!) Latin character set? (Does it depend on O/S?).
> 
> Some depend on the session manager (KDE/Gnome, etc), some on the application
> other on flags within an application, etc.

My development environment is KDE, and I have enabled Arabic input from
within KDE. I have also changed my locale to "ar_QA.UTF-8" in
/etc/sysconfig/i18n (this is a RedHat EL 3.0 based system). I can now
toggle between Arabic & English input using an icon in the system tray.
The final environment will be IceWM - I've yet to experiment in this
environment.


Thank you very much for your help - much appreciated,
Dave.