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Re: My next Arabeyes projects...



Nadim Shaikli a *crit :

> On Mon, 07 Jan 2002 14:20:41 +0100
>  "Chahine M. Hamila" <mch at chaham dot com> wrote:
> >
> > > The 'developer' mailing-list archives are your friend,
> > >
> > >   http://www.arabeyes.org/archives/developer/2002/January/msg00016.html
> >
> > What's the U+3000 limit in Xfree86???
> >
>
> Chahine, follow that thread on the 'developer' list that is all the info
> I/we have - if you have issues, mail Markus (CC - roozbeh and 'developer').

Tayeb Nadim. I went on the XFree86 archives to get a bit more details as linked
by Markus, since the discussion that took on developer was enough. I'm not sure
I got all the details, but I got enough to know that this is an issue of
efficiency at the XFree86 level, and that the effort I would have to deploy to
dig into the details and develop it would produce zillions times more for
Arabeyes.
I think I'll go for reverse bidi in fribidi now. And maybe later take a look at
what it would take me to do a spell correcter as you suggested.

>
> > > I'm not talking about session terminals (KDE's or Gnome's); I'm talking
> > > vanilla xterm (akin to what's been done to vim -- no external libs needed
> > > except for fribidi).
> >
> > Still waiting for an explanation;)
>
> Well, there are all sorts of terminals out there:
>
>  xterm (orig terminal)
>  Eterm (Enlignment's version)
>  rxvt
>  gterm (gnome's term)
>  kterm (kde's term - if there is such a thing)
>
>  etc.etc.etc.
>
> What we should do is try to find a solution that will encompass all these
> things (underlying library or whatever) - and if there is NO central
> solution then we should look by adding arabic to the MOST COMMON terminal
> emulator out there.  There is also the issue that KDE and GNOME already
> support Arabic (with QT & Pango respectively), so its very likely that
> gterm (or whatever name its under) and kterm (if there is such a thing)
> already might support Arabic.

In fact gnome-terminal and Kvt do not support Arabic (a Akka like approach would
have to be integrated, rather than a I18N toolkit with bidi support). I can't
tell you for sure that these are the most used, but I would safely place my bet
on these two since they are part of the Gnome and KDE projects (I personally use
Gnome-terminal more than any other, and used to use Kvt when gnome did have its
terminal yet).

>
>
> The point to recap is NOT to work on gterm first (if it doesn't have arabic
> support already), but to look into the MOST COMMON term first (whatever
> that might be - what comes standard with all the linux distributions ? xterm
> or rxvt or whatever)

Note that these terminals do not necessarily share code. Now, we might want to
go and ask Debian about their programs use statistics, which would give us a
good indication as to which are the most used.

> and add code to it and make sure that that code is
> Incorporated into their main branch.  The inclusion is very important
> (we should NOT work on external projects unless our code has a very good
> chance of making it to their main trunk).

Agreed,
Salaam,
Chahine