Hi all,
first forgive me for sending this on developer, but this discussion
started here and anyway this seems to be the only active list.
I promised you all that I'll try to write some Arabic documents using
docbook and LyX and then document my experience.
I was very optimistic after some simple tests I did using LyX, however
I'm not that optimistic anymore.
I tried to write a document directly in Docbook, I wrote a small doc
on katoob that will be published in Linux-Egypt.org soon.
the moment I started using arabic the problems began
first SGML demands that only ASCII characters are used in the SGML
source, you can ignore this but you'll get many error messages, since
most sgml tools fail after 200 error messages, you'll have to change
the maximum error value to something like 99999999 for arabic docs to
produce correctly.
as far as I can tell using the openjade tools you can only make arabic
HTML docs, arabic support for jadetex is not there yet.
a common strategy is to use htmldoc to convert the HTML output to PDF
but htmldoc does not support UTF-8 either.
so far if you use sgml you stick to html output (did not check rtf and
troff output since I'm not rally interested in them).
I think things could be easier if I switch to XML, however the html
output created by openjade when using XML is horrible and I failed to
use the java/xslt based engines (every thing java based fails with me
:-(
so far it is not that bad, you have to add one extra command line
option and grep around the error to read the real errors in your sgml
doc.
but the real problem is that the GNU/Linux based webbrowsers
cannot display the produced arabic HTML correctly.
for some reason mozilla/galeon put space all over the place and
scramble bidi paragraphs (in fact it doesn't have to be bidi, its
enough to have tags inside the paragraph for mozilla to screw up,
apparently the problem is in having bidi in the html source input).
Konquerer makes a better job out of it but scrambles the table of
contents and some section headings.
lynx and IE produce the pages correctly and with no problems at all.
check the output at
http://www.geocities.com/alaaov/lug/katoob/ar/
my primary interest in the subject was to find a simple and easy to
use way for arabic users to write arabic documents.
I think LyX with LaTeX is a better option.
and anyway the latest version of Koffice has perfect arabic support.
I don't think my docbook/LyX article is needed anymore.
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"]
Attachment:
pgp00032.pgp
Description: PGP signature