Announcement: BiCon 0.0.20040401 released

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

Hi,

This is my great pleasure to announce on behalf of the Arabeyes
project, the sudden release of BiCon "Is this the Fake Release or
the One from Yesterday" 0.0.20040401.


Download
--------

http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/arabeyes/bicon-0.0.20040401.tar.gz


What is BiCon
-------------

BiCon is the Bidirection Console layer, which allows you to read
and write Arabic/Persian in the Linux console and other supported
terminal emulators.

If you feel like the functionality is familiar, you are right.
BiCon is here to deprecate the old Akka, which itself used to
deprecate ACon.  BiCon is based on the old "farsi", a.k.a fcon
code base from the FarsiWeb project.

Since being blessed BiCon, the project calmly lives in the
Arabeyes project:

http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=BiCon


Installation
------------

You need the FriBidi library to compile this program. Probably
you have it in your distribution. If not, get it from
http://fribidi.sourceforge.net/

Installation is simple, the usual steps:

        ./configure
        make
        make install


Usage
-----

This program currently can be used under Linux console, or
terminal emulators with basic Unicode rendering support, like
gnome-terminal, xterm, or PuTTY.

Simply run "bicon" to get a console supporting Arabic or Persian.
The language used is chosen according to the LANG environment
variable.

You can also choose the language country by specifying the
country on
the country on the command line, e.g ::

        bicon sa          # enables Arabic (Saudi Arabia) support
        bicon ir          # for Persian(Iran)

Of course, you have a man page bicon(1) to check.

In the Linux console, you can switch between English and
Arabic/Persian keyboard by pressing Alt+Shift on the right half
of your keyboard.

To test that your BiCon is lighting the cold dark console up, do
"cat testtext/hafez" and watch for a nicely rendered sonnet of
Hafez.


Reporting Bugs
--------------

Please report all bugs to
http://bugs.arabeyes.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/query.cgi
Feedback at developer at arabeyes dot org is also welcome.


Cheers,
Behdad Esfahbod
Arabeyes Project
http://www.arabeyes.org/