Arabic text entry

["Weaver, Dave" <davew at wsieurope dot com>]

Greetings,

 

I hope I have come to the right place to ask my initial questions...

 

One of my company's products is a specialised 3D graphics program; I have been asked to add some Arabic font support to the "text  tool", to allow a client of ours to enter Arabic text into his graphics scenes.

 

Being a complete novice in the areas of Arabic, fonts, locales, unicode, etc., I feel as though I've been thrown in at the deep end, and would really appreciate some advice on how to go about acheiving my goal.

 

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?

 

If it's relevant, the software runs on Linux (RHEL 3.0), uses the standard X widget set (I think - I'm not overly familiar with the software either!), and does use Unicode at some level under the hood (although currently not at the text entr level). OpenGL, Inventor, and TrueType fonts are used internally.

 

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?).

 

Many thanks in advance for any help,

Regards,

Dave Weaver.