Re: Bayani status

[ayoub al othmany <alothmanye at yahoo dot com>]

Aîd Moubarak to all,
 Youcef,
  I'd like to congratulate you about the "terrific"
work you have been doing. Sorry for not participating
more these last days but i have problems with my
distro (slackware linux) to support arabic langUage. 


After many long hours of installing, reading and
googling, the result is almost rubbish ! (i manage to
get mltem working nevertheless). 
So i have a simple question to all of you :
*Which* distro do you recommend for a full support of
arabic ?

Maybe this question has been already answered but i
acknowledge that i am to lazy to search the complete
mailing-list archives. However google gives no anwsers
(^_^).


I also compiled bayani on my linux but arabic fonts
are not displayed, though i installed all the fonts as
explained in www.arabeyes.org/howto/arabic-howto.en.
Actually, instead of characters, i get empy
rectangles.
Is it a hopeless case to have beautiful arabic letters
on my slackware linux ?

I have one small remark about the french translation:
bayani is distributed in arabic, english and french.
If we look at things from french-speaking user's side,
i think we would not understand why the parser does
not support french language. 

But as you said, maybe it is not the priority right
now. When we see all the work made and the result
obtained, the real thing to do is to publicize bayani.
I know that in one of your emails you have already
thought about that. I think we should focus on that
task. I am not an expert in adervertising techniques
but maybe the first thing to do is to contact
universities, schools, teachers, etc. What do you
think ?
It also means that some tutorials must be made to help
people with using Bayani.

As to your question about implementing a chadda and
arakat sensitive script language, i would suggest to
let users write arabic words without taking into
account that aspect. But actually, I am wondering if
this "add-on" to bayani  is not an attempt to make the
FIRST SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION SYSTEM IN ARABIC like
maple, mathematica, magma (my favourie one),...!!

Personnally I intensively use latex and I need to
import  gaphics mainly in eps format (it is just a
matter of taste). Bayani proposes only one type of
format file, the png format. I knwow that there are
tools that convert from png to anything else, but what
about integrating directly other file formats in
Bayani ?

Ayoub.

--- Youcef Rabah Rahal <yrrahal42 at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> Salam All and Idkoum Moubarak :)
> 
> I would like to take a few lines to talk about the
> current status of Bayani.
> 
> Since the last release (0.1a, 27th January), there
> have been significant 
> changes made, the three main ones are:
> 
> 1- MDI (Multi Document Interface) is now fully
> working, so it is possible to 
> open multiple frames in one sesssion, each frame can
> contain multiple 
> graphs.
> 
> 2- A script window has been implemented. I'm
> implementing the script 
> language. This is very useful to automate graphs
> redrawing in case of a 
> change in the data, by re-executing the script from
> a text file.
> 
> 3- The symbolic computation is now functional, at
> least for the derivation.
> 
> Please have a look at this screenshot:
>
http://perso.club-internet.fr/youcef.rahal/bayani/screenshots/bayani-Feb-11-2003.png
> 
> Again, the script and the symbolic computation work
> in Arabic in the 
> arabic/default version, and in English in the
> English/French Translations. I 
> didn't find it necessary to make a French
> translation of them since I think 
> French people would prefer continue to use the
> now-familiar English 
> terminology. Of course I may be wrong, and this can
> be changed quite easily 
> in case I receive enough feedback/remarks about it.
> 
> The Arabic command script is in my point of view
> quite necessary, first of 
> all because we change the alphabet, so we have to
> use new words. Also, 
> because this is one of the main goals of Bayani:
> have a symbolic computation 
> feature working natively in Arabic, and not only the
> graphical interface.
> 
> This may seem unnatural to those who have never used
> a command/programming 
> language in Arabic (I'm one of them). But I think
> this is essentially a 
> question of habit. If I used an arabic programming
> language early in my 
> education, this wouldn't be unnatural for me right
> now. But I think it's not 
> too late to change that :)
> 
> Did anybody here ever heard about or used an Arabic
> programming language ? 
> Or about any attempts to create such a language ? I
> am asking this question, 
> because it would be better to see what people did
> before, what they did 
> think about etc. Even if the script command language
> I'm implementing is not 
> properly a programming language.
> 
> For example, here is a practical question: should we
> make this script 
> language "Shadda" and "Harakat" sensitive or not ?
> If yes, the user should 
> type in the exact arabic word required by the
> parser, otherwise it would be 
> a syntax error. If not (in order to have a more
> user-friendly script), we 
> have to take account of any forms of the word that a
> user may enter (with or 
> without Shadda, Harakat, Hamza etc), and it can
> quickly generate some 
> headache to think about all the possibilties that a
> word can take in this 
> case.
> 
> Another question is the proper arabic words (that
> wouldn't sound awkward) to 
> be used in that language.
> 
> If i'm not being clear enough, please feel free to
> point out what seem dark 
> to you and I'll be happy to clarify it. Also, I
> really need your feedback on 
> this, and on what features you think may be added to
> Bayani so it can reach 
> a larger audience etc :)
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Youcef.
> 
> 
>
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