Re: new member..

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <aalarfaj at gmail dot com>]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:48:04 +0100, Ali El Dada
<eldada at student dot chalmers dot se> wrote:
> Hello everybody..
> 
> I am a Lebanese studying for my Master's degree in Sweden, and I came
> across arabeyes while searching for something regarding my thesis work
> here at the University.. I am actually working within the Language
> Technology group and my work is to implement the Arabic Grammar, but I
> won't speak more about that right now, if interested I'll chat some more
> later! So I wanted to be able to type arabic letters from within KDE and
> did a google search which lead me to arabeyes' work on Arabic, and I
> found it really interested and impressive, and I would really like to
> join, as a translator for now. (But btw I still didn't figure out how to
> type Arabic letters in KDE cause the post on Arabeyes that I saw said
> that you can but didn't say how, so if you can help please do!).
[...]

Great to have you with us. We could definitely use another translator.
We have several translation projects and almost all of them need help
in some way or another. If your a KDE fan, then I strongly recommend
you join the KDE "squad". Don't let thr 99% fool you, KDE still needs
a LOT of work in terms of quality assurance. Are you up for that? If
you want to do actual translation work to whet your appetite there's
Gnome, but it may be sometime before you can start work on that, or
there's Thunderbird, under the Mozilla suite.

As a new member, you get to work at the rate that best suits you. By
your skills though I can guess you will be extremely useful for us :-)

As for typing Arabic within KDE, did you install all the necessary
components? You need to install both fribidi and some Arabic fonts.
(see Khotot project on Arabeyes[1]). Also you will need to be using
KDE 3.2 (I think) or later.

After you have these installed type xkbmap ar at a prompt and you
should be able to start writing in Arabic, or you can use the
appropriate KDE Panel applet for switching between languages, if your
GUI-inclined.

Please do select a project, and browse through its repository of PO
files. You will need to install kbabel btw to work with PO files. See
the translation HOWTO[2]. We will then help you in getting started and
working right away.

Salam and thanks for joining,

Abdulaziz,

[1]: Khotot project: http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=khotot
[2]: Translation HOWTO:
http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/guide/translator-guide-en/