Re: Arabic Unicode terminal support

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Nori Heikkinen <nori+arabeyes at maenad dot net> wrote:
> I'm running Debian, and I'm trying to set up my terminals to deal with
> Arabic UTF-8 data.  Sifting through hundreds of howtos and such about
> unicode in general, it seems that I _should_ be able to set my locales
> to ar_EG.UTF-8 (picked Egypt semi at random), open an xterm with the
> -u8 flag, and then view files (say, in cat, or vim, which I understand
> has good UTF-8 support[1]).  But I still get all kinds of non-Arabic
> characters.

What you note above should "kinda" work (the reason I used kinda is you
will not see any shaping - ie. the Arabic characters will not be joined
nor will you get bidi, unless you intercept and pipe, etc).  Make sure
you run xterm-180+ (or better) and specify a font that has both 8859-6
as well as form-B glyphs (you can find fonts on Arabeyes' "khotot" project).

Here's something that I use often,

  http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/arabeyes/ae_fonts_mono.tar.bz2

(xterm -u8 -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1)

And a sample file to look at would be,

  http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/ar_utf8

> While I can't see utf8 Arabic, I _can_ see utf8 IPA fonts[2] using
> `xterm -u8`.  I realize that I need to get a bi-directional library
> like libfribidi0, as xterm doesn't (and won't[3] support
> bi-directional text by itself), and I have ... but that's secondary
> right now, as I can't see the script at all.

A more working solution is to use mlterm (mlterm.sf.net) along with
fribidi (ie. make sure you have it compiled into mlterm) and that should
give you Bidi/Shaping on a terminal emulator that is fully working.

 
http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/howto/arabic-howto-en/xwindows.html#XTERMINALS

> I've been reading up on this for days.  Do I need a Unicode terminal
> font that supports Arabic, and if so, can someone reccomend one?
> Also, could anyone point me to a good Arabic UTF-8 howto, or something
> similar?
>
> [3] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#xterm

I've had recent conversations (well from about 2-3 months ago) and xterm's
maintainer noted that he is open to the idea of including Bidi and would
consider a patch for it.  As such we need to clean-up an old patch that is
still floating around and resubmit it (shaping is very easy to fix later
on).

  http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/developer/2004/January/msg00095.html

Let us know if you are interested in help out include Bidi into xterm.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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