Re: BIDI tags Unicode values

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002 20:31:53 +0300,
  "Alaa The Great" <alaa annosoor org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I certainly don't mean to take anything away from Mr. Sameer's (and
your) exceptional work and efforts, but "keyboard emulation" is there
and has been there in most Arabic supporting editors (emacs/vim/yudit/etc).

> 2 export to HTML numerical character reference
> 
> HTML numerical character references is HTML's way of representing
> Unicode characters they look like this ? 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.

I'm not sure what this means, could you elaborate a bit ?  What's wrong
with writing a UTF-8 html file (along with noting the encoding format
in the document's header) and have the browser do the correct display.

Are you talking about old browser support or coming up with solutions
for browsers that don't support UTF-8 ?  I guess I'm missing some
scenario where the above doesn't work; if so could you please present it.

If you have some URLs that talk about "HTML numerical character reference",
do please mention 'em.

> 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.

Very true, a number of people have looked at the code and say that its
very well written and so it sounds like a great learning source for anyone
looking to get into GTK+.

> thanx Mohamed for a great program,

And keep that effort (and others ;-) coming Mohamed, your work and
dedication is very much appreciated (don't disappear on us again :-)

Salam and welcome aboard Alaa.

 - Nadim


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com