KDiff3 Arabization

[gar at arabink dot com]

(Second try, with correct address. ;)

Hi list,

The developer of KDiff3 has expressed strong interest in adding Arabic support.
  Below is his email in response to my query.  I've answered most of his
suggestions, and proposed that we move the conversation to dev at arabeyes dot org dot 

Please see my post yesterday to general at arabeyes dot org regarding requirements for
Arabic diff'ing.  Rather than deluge Joachim with emails with requirements, I
propose we use the arabeyes wiki to work them out, and he can monitor.

If the maintainer of the wiki is reading this: can you add an entry to the
"Starting Points" section of the main page as follows:

   * Arabization Requirements - information on what proper Arabic support means
in practice

or something like that.

thanks,

-gregg
==== start quote
Hi Gregg,

On Monday 29 November 2004 17:45, Reynolds-Gregg wrote:
> I'm in dire need of a diff tool that works with Arabic text (utf-8).
> Can you give me a rough idea of how much effort it would make to
> implement Arabic support in Kdiff3?  This means it must (obviously) do
> the compare properly, but also that it must display the results
> properly and support elementary editing functionality for merging.

This is very interesting. So far I see the following requirements:
- Unicode (utf-8) support,
- Writing and editing from right to left,
- Support for variable width fonts
- User interface and documentation translation into Arabic (Would you want to
do that?)
- I've heard that numbers must be written from left to right (as opposed to
text)

If you are aware of anything else please tell me.

And could you please answer these questions?
- For what system do you need this (Windows or Linux/Unix)?
- What other (open & closed source) programs have you tried and where do they
fail?
- What kind of texts are you going to compare (single or multi-language)? Does
the right-to-left writing change within the text?
- How soon do need this?
- Would you be able to test and possibly debug?

I suppose that this feature is very demanding and since I don't understand
Arabic I would need help especially for testing.
If you can help me there and with the translation, then I would consider going
for it.

Cheers,
Joachim

=== end quote