Re: Learn Arabic tool ?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Martin Godisch wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 21:45:48 -0700, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> > Arabic is a bit more complicated in that it not only requires Bidi, it
> > also needs what is termed shaping (that's when characters change their
> > shape based on where they are within the word).
> 
> o.k., never heard about it.
> 
> > This is very much a solved problem.  How did you go about invoking
> > Bidi in curses ?  Could you please state what is needed for us to
> > replicate your settings ?
> 
> In the ncursesw interface the reference string is already right-to-left,
> it's just printed to the screen with proper alignment. The translated
> string (input) is internally reversed before printing it. GTK+ provides
> libpango, which takes care of these things internally, I only have to
> specify the direction of the input line.

The screenshot which you attached doesn't indicate proper Arabic.  There
seem to be two problems,

 1. The Arabic term (with black background) seems to have bidi applied
    to it, but no shaping (for a brief intro into shaping peer over this
    perl code).

      http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/tools/shape_bidi/

 2. The "wrong" indication (bottom of the screenshot) doesn't have shaping
    and doesn't seem to have had Bidi* applied to it either.

I'd be willing to help given I can reproduce these results (unless you'd
like to make the changes yourself - they're rather minor really).  Could
you please instruct me on what I need to compile and which libraries I
need, etc ?  Gtk should present no problem since, as you note, pango
ought to take care of everything automatically.

(*) For bidi details checkout fribidi.sf.net

Regards,

 - Nadim


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