Re: [Fwd: Re: NEWT Support for UTF-8 and Fribidi]

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

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Anmar Oueja wrote:

> hehe.. well we are first determining Newt support for utf-8 so we can
> start hacking in fribidi. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Roozbeh said that you will release fribidi with shaping come March 5th.
> Is it possible to get that now so we can start testing.


FriBidi with shaping would be available in March, but before that
there are lots of things that can be done:

1. Clean Unicode support in ncurses and slang.

2. Clean Unicode support in newt (requires 1).

And by Unicode I do not simply mean UTF-8, but things like Zero
Width characters, etc.

Then you can on more step, to:

3. Right-to-left support in ncurses and slang.

4. Right-to-left support in newt.

This definitely needs FriBidi.  But there are things that are not
related to FriBidi, for example right-to-left dialogs.  And even
if FriBidi takes toooooo long to be out, you can use the current
FriBidi code (without shaping) and port it later.

So, I hope you have been convinced that FriBidi is not blocking
your way ;).

Yes, I know that first making something that writes Arabic i
some random places and then trying to fix that is easier than
first fixing that and then learn it how to write Arabic ;-).

behdad


> Salam
>
> Anmar