punctuation problem solved in Mandrake

[Leston Buell <bulbul at fizzylogic dot com>]

Hi. I thought i´d post my solution of part of the Arabic punctuation 
problem i posted in July. For some reason, perhaps with the latest 
version of OpenOffice.org (1.1 RC), the problem with Arabic question 
mark, period, exclamation point went away. (I don´t know exactly when 
the problem disappeared, so i can´t say much more about that.) That 
problem was that all of the punctuation came out as if i were typing in 
Latin characters rather than Arabic. So, for example, the question mark 
wouldn´t be in the correct orientation for Arabic.

However, another aspect of what seemed like the same problem lingered 
on. I could type everything normally except for the blasted comma. It 
always came out like English. It turns out that the "problem" was that 
the only Arabic keyboard configuration in Mandrake 9.0/9.1 is for North 
African locales, rather than for Egypt (to which i'm accustomed). So, 
the numerals were like for French. Of course, if you're using French 
numerals in Arabic, then you still need a Latin comma. You use Latin 
comma for numerals and an Arabic comma for text. So, i kept typing what 
on a US qwerty keyboard is a comma. In Egypt, that would give you an 
Arabic comma when typing in Arabic, but i guess that in North Africa, it 
gives you the Latin comma for typing numerals. The Arabic comma in this 
configuration is at Shift+k (Shift+nuun).

Today i wrote an entire letter in OpenOffice.org in Arabic. This was the 
first time i've been able to type an entire document in Arabic since i 
started using Linux five years ago. (Before, i used WordPerfect for 
Windows with the Arabic language pack.) I'm ecstatic!

The question of how to get a non-North African Arabic keyboard 
configuration into Mandrake (and elsewhere), complete with Arabic Arabic 
numerals, still remains.

Leston