Fwd: Re: Wine Bidi Development

[Isam Bayazidi <isam at bayazidi dot net>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Wine Bidi Development
Date: Friday 06 February 2004 22:49
From: Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh dot biz>
To: Isam Bayazidi <isam at bayazidi dot net>

Hi Isam,

Isam Bayazidi wrote:
>Hi there..
>  I would like to ask you about the progress of adding BiDi support in Wine,
>where did it reach? how far did it go?

Basically, reordering of output text for single line texts is pretty
done. There are problems with the more complicated cases, but these mean
that (at least for Hebrew), things are pretty useable as they currently
are. The bug at http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=609 is trying to
be a coordination point to all BiDi related bugs.

> and how close is it to be done ?

Still a lot more work. Multi line printing does not, yet, work fully as
needed (though probably in a non-blocking way), dialogs saying their
text is right to left, edit control (a big one), as well as many minor
bugs (most known are documented in bugzilla).

> and
>how can a non-coder (capable, but not into) like me help you get it done ?

I guess mostly trying things out and reporting bugs when you find them.
Please be sure to manually CC me on Bugzilla bugs you open.

>Another thing..  and if help is needed with Arabic shaping support, or it is
>still early for that ?

Good question. Wine does not, currently, have any shaping done at all.
ICU, which is the library Wine currently uses for BiDi reordering, also
supports shaping. The problem is that, as far as I'm concerned, ICU
should go out the door as soon as fribidi is capable of handling UTF-16.
Fribidi, however, does not currently support shaping.

I don't have a whole of a lot of time to work on shaping (though I
suspect it won't be a big deal with ICU, so I may just be able to
squeeze it in anyways). Knowing that there is someone around to test it
out (as I don't remeber my Arabic one bit) will be a great help with that.

Worst case, if and when we switch to Fribidi, we'll regress Arabic
shaping, and handle that problem at that time. It is entirely possible
that by that time fribidi will support shaping too.

> and what about Arabic keyboard input support ?

There is no keyboard support for Arabic at the moment, but I'll note two
things about that. The first is that Wine is highly likely to work
without specific support anyways (please do try it out and report). The
other is that adding support is no big deal, even for a non-coder.

On another note, a while back (don't remeber when), one of the Arabeyes
guys in Jordan began working on it. As far as I know, he had Arabic
keyboard supported and working, except he never released the code. Like
I said, this may prove to be a moot point.

> is it
>done ? what is needed ?

Hopefully, nothing is needed at all.

>Thank you very much for your efforts into this and other OpenSource
> projects..

Your'e welcome. This is, literally, my pleasure.

>---
>Yours
>Isam Bayazidi

                   Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Systems Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

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