Re: Fixing the Arabic keyboard in xorg/xfree86

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

It's not about the xorg context at all.  "parenleft" is defined
as "opening paranthesis" in the Unicode standard.  All Persian
keyboards (except for MacOS X) implement this.


On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Munzir Taha wrote:

> Salaam,
> Previously, I mentioned a bug regarding the incorrect display of parenthesis
> in an Arabic context and thought it's a qt bug. After I heard that Lars of qt
> says it's only available in X, I did a small change to xkb to conform to
> Unicode BidiMirroring and it turned out that this would fix the problem. It
> also turned out that this is not a dirty hack since what "parenleft" means in
> xorg context, is "opening parenthesis". And an opening parenthesis in a
> right-to-left context is clearly Shift+0, not Shift+9. You can also make sure
> it's not a hack by  transfering files between KDE and other environments
> (Java, Win32, Mac) and you would notice that the parantheses direction is
> correct.
>
> I also check the Hebrew keyboard and found it has the same bug but to my
> surprise when I checked the farsi/iranian keymap it has already implemented
> this fix.
>
> The changes are simply
>
>     key <AE09> {  [               9,      parenright      ]     }; // Mirrored
>     key <AE10> {  [               0,       parenleft      ]     }; // Mirrored
>
>     key <AD11> {  [     Arabic_jeem,       braceright     ]     }; // Mirrored
>     key <AD12> {  [      Arabic_dal,       braceleft      ]     }; // Mirrored
>
>     key <AC03> {  [      Arabic_yeh,       bracketright   ]     }; // Mirrored
>     key <AC04> {  [      Arabic_beh,       bracketleft    ]     }; // Mirrored
>
> I was about to submit a bug/patch to xorg but thought it's better to fix other
> issues so we submit one bug.
> The other issues is related to the layout. The layout defined is not the most
> public layout.
>
>
> //I doubt this common
>     key <BKSL> {  [            less,         greater      ]     };
>
> //To map an English character on an Arabic keyboard is odd
>     key <AC02> {  [     Arabic_seen,               S      ]     };
>
> There is also one parenthesis in xkb_symbols "azerty_digits" which was not
> closed!!
>
> There are some other issues that need to be addressed like difining a third
> state be added to Group2? Also what about adding ZWNJ and ZWJ to the layout?
>
> Any one interested in discussing these issues?
>
>

--behdad
  behdad.org