Arabic, Bidi and Shaping Progress Report
Hello All:
After some tries I am sad to say that nothing got done on that front.
There are many reasons why nothing happened that I will outline in this
email.
1. Some people said to hack NEWT other said curses and slang must be
hacked too. It was very confusing as to where we need to start and how
to get there. If anybody can give me expert advice as to where to get
things done I can at least start targeting the right people.
2. Anybody who was interested in doing such a hack had no time . Since I
am not a developer myself, I had to depend on developers to get it done.
3. The curses developer indicated that they will put in bidi once it
incorporate shaping. Well Shaping should be added to Fribidi by March
5th (as I was promised). The question is, is it worth it to continure
hacking NEWT,Slang and curses then ?
4. There is the GTK2 portion of the installer that will be able to use
all the arabic translations out of the box. I still need to decide how
far this project is and when can we epxect to see and beta relase of it.
5. I was thinking to running the debian installer on top of bicon
(arabic fribidi layer for the console) but the author of this software
has indicated that it will not work. There are other ways to integrate
bicon in but the results are not guranteed nor predictable. In light of
all this uncertainty, i have decided that it is best that we do it the
right way trhough proper bidi and shaping in curse, slang and newt.
In Summary, nothing happened but the prospects look good. I strongly
suggest you go with beta3 with out any arabic support due to the
uncertainty of anything hapening. I would recommend you keep the arabic
language showing in the list of langs. Somebody might decide to aid us
and get it done ;)
Kind Regards,
Anmar Oueja
---
www.arabeyes.org
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