Re: Wine, Bidi, and Arabic

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>]

On Wednesday 08 January 2003 07:57, you wrote:
> Hi Isam,
>
> I have not heard from you after my last email. I hope all is well.

It seems that this email had been long time ago that i do not remember.. I 
have the archive of my last years emails on a CD, I will look into it later 
.. but as I remember, in your previous email, I got the impression that it 
was still under development. 


> The current status is that Wine should display Arabic more or less
> (well, more less than more, but quite readable anyways) in the right
> order. There is no joining or glyphing support as of yet. There is not
> likely to be either unless Behdad puts it into FriBiDi, or you get me
> someone to do it in Wine (or at least QA it). In any case, I'm talking
> about somewhat long-term, as there are bigger problems to handle than
> even the proper reordering. There is also some chance the IBM will
> (finally) release their patch (partial though it is).

So IBM is doing (has done) a patch for Wine to fix Bidi and maybe shaping. 
About FriBidi and shaping, this is what we had been urging Behdad for. We 
will revisit this issue again with Behdad hoping that it will get to a 
resolution. 


> There is one thing that does need doing to get Arabic to work, though.
> You absolutely need to define an Arabic keyboard in Wine. This
> essentially involves editing dlls/x11drv/keyboard.c to include an Arabic
> keyboard layout. Without this change you will not be able to type Arabic
> characters.

OK< I grabbed this file from the CVS, I will do the patch, it seems that it is  
not a hard one. Now I noticed that the encoding for characters in the 
keyboard definition is not UTF-8, am I mistaken ? if it is UTF-8, I will have 
a patch for Arabic keyboard within an hour, to whom should I send the patch ?


> I have talked to Jeremy White, CEO of Code Weavers. Someone called
> "Hetz" is actively pushing them to add support for Hebrew Office 2K to
> CrossOver office. I find it very hard to believe that Arabic is too far
> behind, but the whole deal will only go through if he feels there is
> enough market there to justify the extra work. We could sure use your
> help in creating demand for this.

Well I asked about Arabic support in CrossOver Office some time back to the 
CrossOver Support, without a reply.. There is a need for CrossOver Office 
with Arabic support, as until now Office Suits in Linux come short when it 
comes to Arabic spellchecking.. while MS-Office do it real fine.. I was about 
to recommend CrossOver Office to a company migrating all it's desktops and 
servers to Linux, now that I know that CrossOver Office does not support 
Arabic I am not sure how to answer their instant need for Arabic Spell 
Checker in Linux. 

> I'm hoping to be able to cooperate in order to bring the open source
> solutions to as many people as possible.

I sure hope that cooperation will continue in open source projects. 

Yours
Isam Bayazidi
Arabeyes.org