Salam,
We have some very tricky problems with the Debian Installer and Arabic
translations.
I a few cases, Arabic causes D-I parts to crash. This is described in
the following bug reports:
http://bugs.debian.org/272136
http://bugs.debian.org/256405
In both cases, the cause seems to be a missing character in the font
we use.
The font used in the Installer is bogl-bterm unifont font.
This font is "reduced" when the installer is built. This means that
all characters which are used in all languages are kept....and, as a
consequence, all other characters are removed.
Each language provides, in a special file, all Unicode characters
needed for a proper display of this language. I have attached this
file for Arabic.
It seems that Arbaic is causing a specific problem : the shaping code
may cause a character which is not originally in an Arabic string to
be used for display after shaping occurred. Thus, if this characters
was removed by the font reduction routine, we have the problem.
Below, you will find an investigation by Frans Pop about bug
#272136. Frans seems to indicate that the problem for instance occurs
with the translation in Arabic of the country names for SY (Syria) and
SA (Saudi Arabia).
Do you by chance have an idea of what is causing this problem. I
suspect a missing character in the attached file, this character being
indeed used after shaping of the translations for Syria and Saudi
Arabia.
The same probably happens for #256145 with the translation of iso-scan
menu item. See attached ar.po file for the current Arabic translation.
This is a very important problem as currently, Arabic translations are
unusable in Debian Installer
Please keep 272136 at bugs dot debian dot org to your answers.
----- Forwarded message from Frans Pop <aragorn at tiscali dot nl> -----
From: Frans Pop <aragorn at tiscali dot nl>
To: 272136 at bugs dot debian dot org
Subject: Re: Bug#272136: countrychooser: db_go fails when choosing Arabic as language
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:28:55 +0200
Cc: Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian dot org>
On Saturday 18 September 2004 13:07, Frans Pop wrote:
> This might indicate there is something wrong with either the first,
> second, last but one or last ('other') country name (my guess would be
> the second).
Hmmm again.
I tested some more and the behavior is very inconsistent. Anyway, I decided
to add countries to the shortlist in a structured way (starting from the
bottom) and the following shortlist displays correctly:
SD IQ KW MA IN YE TN OM QA LB EG
Adding SY or SA to this list results in problems.
A shortlist of JO AE BH DZ LY also causes problems, but only JO BH is ok.
AE definitely causes problems.
So the problem is somewhere in the translations for AE DZ LY SY and/or SA.
I'll leave it to the arabists to sort out which character(s) is/are the
culprit.
As the translations for these 5 countries are also the longest, it might
also have to do something with length.
----- End forwarded message -----
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Attachment:
ar.po
Description: application/gettext