Re: KDE Arabic Support/Arabeyes

["Moe Elzubeir" <Elzubeir at cobaf dot coba dot unt dot edu>]

Hrmm.. Well, then I guess we will do it our way for now (and play with
KBabel myself till he gets back).

I've had a few emails back and forth with Lars some time ago on fonts, I'm
familiar with his expertise. He's extremely helpful.

As for your warnings, that is understood, and I think the idea of a .1 release
is probably the only way of doing it, until you can stabilize the string entries.

As far as the localization goes, I have seen the message you cc'd, and here
is what I can tell you. Arab countries are geographically spread through-out
Asia and Africa (as you already know). In the Middle East, there is of course, Israel
(which is by no means an Arab country). 

I personally don't recommend using 'middle east' as it excludes many other
Arab countries which are not geographically nor politically part of the
Middle East (e.g., Libya, Algeria, Morocco, etc.)

We can either do it as Africa and Asia, or 'ara' to include all the
Arab countries (and the list would come directly from the 'Arab League'
country members).

I'm open to suggestions of course.

>>> Thomas Diehl <thd at kde dot org> 08/22/01 08:31AM >>>
Am Mittwoch, 22. August 2001 14:53 schrieb Moe Elzubeir:

> I wrote to the KBAbel author to ask about Arabic support, but I still
> have not received any response from him.

You won't probably receive any for at least another week or two -- he 
is on vacation. (Also, like I said, he is not exactly a font expert (as 
he says himself) and there might be little he can do without your 
assistance and before he and everything else switched to Qt3 with its 
full bidi support -- but this is mere guessing on my side.)

BTW: Lars Knoll (the font and bidi expert at TrollTech) is on vacation, 
too, and will probably find a big backlog of work if he comes back.

Two more things:

1) Unfortunately, I have to warn you about the difficult timing of our 
translation business:

*  If you start full steam very early in the release process you run 
the risk of losing a lot of work -- due to the rapid development and 
the following proof-reading the original strings are changing all the 
time. So you have to go through the same stuff over and over again, 
retranslating and removing "fuzzy strings" all the time.

*  If you start too late in the process (say: only after the message 
freeze for an upcoming release was declared) you may not have enough 
time to finish your translation and test everything.

This is a dilemma we have not been able to solve in a real satisfactory 
way. We usually have additional x.x.1 releases (like the upcoming 
2.2.1) to give the translators some more time for completing and 
polishing but even this is rarely enough.

2) Translation teams are also supposed to contribute the data for the 
country settings in the KDE Control Center (-> Personalization -> 
Country & Language). For this, you should fill in the necessary data in 
an entry.desktop file like the other ones in kdebase/l10n, one for each 
country which uses your language as the main one -- quite a few for 
Arabic I think. For details see the README in the same directory 
(http://kdewebcvs.nebsllc.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdebase/l10n/)

If the regions "asia" and "africa" provided there are not fine-meshed 
enough we could probably get an additional "middle-east" if you want to.

Regards,

Thomas



-- 
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Deutsche KDE-Uebersetzung: http://i18n.kde.org/de/

―--
Mohammed Elzubeir