Re: BIDI tags Unicode values

[Alaa The Great <alaa at annosoor dot org>]

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On Fri, 30 Aug 2002 17:55:07 +0300
Mohammed Sameer <Uniball at gmx dot net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> i found that the unicode values for the arabic letters is
> Arabic Unicode characters are:

I'm not sure if everyone here is keeping up with the development of
katoob, right now Mohamed is working on two very important and
innovative features

1 Arabic Keyboard Emulation
this means that if no Arabic keyboard is configured katoob the user
can still type Arabic in katoob, katoob catches the Latin letters and
translates them to Arabic according to a keymap file.
this is very important, it means that katoob works right out of the
box, and needs no extra configuration, it also means that it is easy
to write Arabic without disturbing any XFree configuration the system
has.
Mohamed is working on supporting multiple keymap files when that is
done it opens up many interesting possibilities like binding certain
keychords to common words (creating bindings for HTML tags for
instance), one possibility is to create a keymap that binds keys by
their  sound, this will make it easy to type Arabic on a non Arabic
keyboard, for instance you type a when you want alef and b when you
want ba2 etc.
no imagine this scenario with me, you are somewhere abroad and you
want to send an Arabic email, easy just fins yourself a GNU/Linux
computer download katoob and you are writing Arabic, no matter what
the keyboard is and the current configuration for X is.

2 export to HTML numerical character reference

HTML numerical character references is HTML's way of representing
Unicode characters they look like this &#1560; Arabic text in this
format will display correctly on any Unicode compliant browser
regardless of the encoding currently selected, it is the best and most
portable way to create Arabic HTML files.
with katoob you can now save your Arabic text in this format, this
makes katoob a great tool for writing Arabic HTML docs.
until now katoob can only export numerical references, this means that
you cannot edit the HTML file after it is exported but hopefully
Mohamed will implement an import feature soon.

Mohamed realized early on that most GTK and QT based editors will
support Arabic, for katoob to have any reason to exist it has to
support special features geared toward Arabic users, so far we have 4
Arabic specific features (multiple encodings and a language switcher
plus the two features I just described) and work is underway on true
BIDI support (where each line can have its own direction and BIDI
control characters are stored with the text).

if you have any feature that you'd like to see please tell Mohamed is
working nearly 24H on katoob these days and new features are
introduced every two days, and please consider using katoob for your
Arabic text editing we need lots of testing to squash bugs away, at
least help us by opening various documents and saving them in
different encodings
if you want to help with the coding please start right now, so far
only Mohamed works on the code more developers are needed, the code is
very simple (a bit hairy though :-) and is a good example of a GTK+
app, if you are a C hacker and want to learn GTK+ then katoob is the
perfect project its small enough to be understood in one day yet it
uses enough of GTK+ features to make you familiar with the whole API.

thanx Mohamed for a great program,

cheers,
Alaa
- -- 
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we
ourselves possess.
            -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]
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