Re: mlterm & Arabic

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- mig entrisphere com wrote:
> 	I am attempting to teach myself arabic, and have created a bunch
> of programs aimed at testing my vocabulary. Up until now, I have been

Salam Matt, why not release these programs under Open Source so that others
can benefit from your work ?

> running these programs under acon and all was well. I have recently got
> mlterm running under Linux (RH8). I have seen two problems that I am
> having difficulty tracking down, and was wondering if anyone could help.
> 
> i) When being tested Arabic to English, the form of the line is as
> follows:
> 
> 	1) XXXX:
> 
> 	Where XXXX is the arabic word (I type the English transaltion at
> the colon) Since 1 is a weak unicode character, I need to put in a LRM
> character to force left to right ordering. The problem is that mlterm
> echoes a box character to the screen instead of ignoring the LRM
> character. With debugging on I have the following output: (the word I am
> being testing on is mahkamapN (buckwalter notation))
> 
> utf8 text =>
> 2000e 0031 0029 0020 0645 062d 0643 0645 0629 003a 0020 0020
> fribidi_remove_bidi_marks => removed 1 chars
> 0031 0029 0020 0645 062d 0643 0645 0629 003a 0020 0020
> Visual order => 00 01 02 03 08 07 06 05 04 09 10
> 
> As you can see, the visual order is correct (I threw in a call to
> fribidi_remove_bidi_marks, and printed the output). Clearly mlterm is
> trying to print the '200e' (LRM) character. Is this a bug? Has anoyone
> seen this before?

I'm guessing that mlterm ought to make that same call in order to remove
Bidi directives after it determines and sets the "has_rtl" appropriately
from the stripped directives (if any).

> ii) When being tested English to Arabic, after I flip the keyboard
> mapping and begin entering Arabic letters, I can backspace over the
> english. It looks like flipping the keyboard introduces an ambiguity
> into the ordering, and spaces! Are being added to the input.

I've resorted to doing lots of redraws (Ctrl-L) to assist in this regard.

> Any help would be great,
> 				Thanks,
> 
> 					Matt

I'm forwarding this email to mlterm's author since he would certainly
answer you more quickly than I could - but it does seem like a bug
to me.  As for inputting Arabic, there are various issues and I'm
not sure how best to address them (you've stumbled on just one,
there are a heap of others relating to the command-line; none of this
stuff is spec'ed and so we need to address things from the root).
In other words, its _not_ mlterm's fault (far from it) - the process
of what needs to happen is rather unknown since its never been done
before and so we see lots of gray area and what-nots.  Unfortunately,
arabeyes is severely short-handed and so this subject will be
re-addressed later.

Do please CC 'developer' on your conversations regarding mlterm and
any fixes/modifications.

Regards,

 - Nadim


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