Re: Arabic vim

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

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--- Gamal Hegazi <ghegazi at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> Salam Nadim,
> Thanks for your help, I finally got arabic vim to work in UNIX, now I
> hope I will get it to work in cygwin as well.  Also I am still struggling
> to make it print on paper as postscript.
> Here is what I did for UNIX in case someone else bugs you with the same 
> question:
> 
> - In the ~/vim6.2/src/ directory I modified the feature.h file as follows:
> Deleted all the ifdef/endif statements (but left out the #define statements) 
> for the following: FEAT_KEYMAP, FEAT_ARABIC, FEAT_RIGHTLEFT, and FEAT_MBYTE.

I'm not sure why you had to delete or modify anything in the source (plus
it sounds like you simply weren't able to figure out the proper settings
you need to harness the appropriate #define statements - ifdef/endif are
there as compile options which should all be accessible).

Was the printing not working for you unless you did that ?  Could you
narrow down what it was that was not being accessed (ie. which #define).
Was Arabic functional without the above changes, but printing wasn't ?

> - Compiled vim by typing from the ~/vim62/src directory:
> % make
> - Made sure that +arabic appears (note plus) when typing :version
> inside vim.
> - Copied the iso-10646-1 fonts from the following website:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz
> into a directory I called ~/fonts.
> - I defined a font path inside ~/fonts by typing:
> % mkfontdir
> and:
> % xset +fp ~/fonts
> (I included the latter permanently in my .cshrc file)
> - I made a file called 'vimrc' in the ~/vim6.2/src direcotry that
> has the following lines:
> set encoding=utf-8
> set arabic
> set keymap=arabic
> set guifont=-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1
> 
> (notice that the guifont name was obtained from inside one of the font
> files in ~/fonts direcotry).
> - I defined an alias in my .cshrc for vim to edit in Arabic as follows:
> alias vima '~/vim62/src/vim -g -u ~/vim62/src/vimrc'
> 
> (Notice that vim cannot find the keymap files unless it is run from
> there, at least in my case.  Also it has to be run in the GUI mode
> with the option -g).
> This starts vim in the GUI mode and sets it up for Arabic editing as
> per the instructions in the vimrc file.
> - For the default English editing I defined another alias for vim as 
> follows:
> alias vim  '~/vim62/src/vim '
> 
> So by typing '% vima' I write in Arabic and by typing '% vim' I write
> in English.
> Hope this is useful.

Everything else (beyond the source changes) you note is documented in vim's
Arabic help file (as far as I remember).

Salam.

 - Nadim

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