DocBook/XML to PDF Arabic support

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

Salam,

As someof you may know, Arabeyes has now converted completely to
DocBook/XML for our documentation. Typesetting is not a simple issue and
programs to do this are more or less in their beta stage.

Arabeyes is currently using FOP [1], which is written by the Apache
Foundation. It does not support unicode-bidi as per the W3 XSL standards
[2].

As far as fonts are concerned, one can register fonts that support
Arabic as per FOP's documentation on fonts [3]. 

We need someone to take over this project and go head-on with it in
order to enable us to have all the options available for other languages
when it comes to making full use of DocBook/XML.

FOP is written in Java and so Java expertise would be a requirement. Any
takers?

Regards,
Mohammed Elzubeir

[1] http://xml.apache.org/fop/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#unicode-bidi
[3] http://xml.apache.org/fop/fonts.html