Re: Bayani status

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

Salam,

--- Youcef Rabah Rahal <yrrahal42 at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> Don't be disappointed for not being able to
> participate now. There is a lot 
> of things to be done (I can't manage to make such a
> HUGE job only by 
> myself), and your help is/will be needed sooner or
> later :) But, just take 
> your time :))


Thanx a lot ! hope to be ready very soon inshAllah.


> 
> I hope this is not only the case with bayani :)
> Anyway, i think it has more 
> to do with your XServer than with your distrib, but
> I may be worng. In fact, 
> i use Mandrake 9.0 and I choose installation in
> arabic. So, it starts gnome 
> directly in arabic but KDE still shows squares... I
> tried to install 
> truetype fonts etc but the result is disappointing
> (you can see it on the 
> bayani screenshots) and I'm too lazy to fix it.

Frankly i have not yet tried other projects because of
the lack of time. 
Sorry for that...


> 
> Yes, that's a priority. Actually, for example no one
> except me know how to 
> use the command script unless they read the code.
> And since this is not 
> expected from an end user, we have to document and
> make a nice help :)

Once you estimate that the version is OK for
releseasing, I can help
in writing tutorials.

> 
> Actually, you are the 3rd person suugesting this
> (not take shadda etc into 
> account). So i think this is the tendency. I'll take
> this into account and i 
> think that it wouldn't be difficult to change it if
> we find out later that 
> it is not appropriate.

I remember in one email you told that is difficult to
think to all the 
possible forms of a word if we take into account of
the harakats. To whom are you 
thinking  : to the developper , to the end user or
both ?
 
for the user I imagine one solution: let him write
words without harakats 
and if he types TAB button, he gets all the
corresponding words (a kind of 
tab-completion like in shells). I do not know if this
solution is realistic.

> 
> Again, does anybody know about attempts/existing
> arabic symbolic 
> computation/programming languages ? If no, we'll add
> "FIRST SYMBOLIC 
> COMPUTATION SYSTEM IN ARABIC" to Bayani's publicity
> :)

I do not know any and I am sure there is none: it
suffices to see
how difficult it is to have arabic support on linux
:)). 
 
> 
> I am also a regular LaTeX/Postscript user. To be
> frank, I first thought of 
> bayani when i was thinking about writing scientific
> articles in arabic, so 
> came the idea to have figures in arabic too. When
> bayani was a small Xlib 
> app I wrote a function to save to EPS. Since bayani
> has eveolved, this 
> function was not updated. QT permits to save into
> BMP/JPEG/PNG etc so I plan 
> to add all those formats to bayani. So the user can
> save in his/her prefered 
> format directly from bayani and not having to
> convert it later. I plan to 
> add EPS/PS saving. If you are interested and you
> have some postscript 
> language knowledge you can work on it if you like
> (it's totally your choice, 
> i'm not forcing you :)). If you don't have any
> postscript language knowledge 
> you can learn the necessry very quickly (less than
> one hour :)) since the 
> only used concepts are points/lines/shapes and text
> drawing with postscript. 
> I can give you the old xlib code and some
> references. Again, it is 
> completely your choice :)
> 

My knowledge of postscript programming is quite basic.
In some (not rare) 
occasions, i had to "hack" ps files to suits my needs.

I have a 770-page book on postscript always on my desk
but 
never got time to read it!! There is also the
possibility to
integrate directly into Bayani well-known tools 
like png2ps,etc.. Maybe there is a source code
somewhere.

Are you sure that it is easy to write arabic text in
postscript ?
If you have very readable references, please send them
to me. 
I could not guarantee you that this job will be done
so quickly but
I can keep myself busy with this.


Ayoub.


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