[Localization] Help with Arabic computers

[Greg Smith]

Hi All,

Thanks to Marc and Martin for moving this forward. I'm pasting in a few 
threads and adding localization list. Please use the list so I'm not a 
bottle neck.

Osama,

Can you try this test described by Martin below? Let us know if the 
question does not make sense.

On your e-mail:

How did you change to those fonts? Did you run the tests in our Write 
program?

All,

At the bottom of the thread there is a request to setup an Arabic 
Abiword on a PC running Linux to help separate "control" system which 
isolates XO from non-XO issues.

Can anyone help do that?

Also, I created a feature page for this work at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Better_Arabic_Support

Khaled,

Can you add the relevant Arabic bugs from our Trac system there?

I don't think we have closed even the original two you mentioend long 
ago. In any case, I want a single page where we list Abiword and 
dev.laptop.org bugs. Any test cases could be recorded on that page if 
they are not already in the bugs.

BTW I believe that we have all the people in place to test and fix 
problems. We just need more project management help. Its not a technical 
skill so anyone can help if you are organized and have a little time. 
Send me an e-mail or reply on list and I'll work with you.

Thanks,

Greg S

***********
Guys, as a quick test case, I tried two different arabic fonts.

1) norasi
2) nafees

I tried the following word (dhahaba) (which means he went)as a simple test
case.

In arabic keyboard it is

bif

In norasi the shaping works fine, bit in nafees the "i" does not get shaped
with the rest of the word.

Another thing I tried the same word (dhahaba) but with soft vowels which
should be
bSQiSQfSQ

SQ represents the soft vowel (a)

It looks like in norasi it does it fine for the first letter and then there
is a glithc which brings the vowel to the bottom. You can try it out. Other
words worked fine I think, so it might be unique to the letter/font.

Osama
**********


Martin Sevior wrote:
> Hi Marc,
> 
> I'm not surprised that happens if you type a western European language
> in RTL mode. Poor pango would be awfully confused...
> 
> I've tried copy and pasting Arabic text from Arabic websites into the
> middle of Arabic text (also from Arabic websites) and it looks OK to
> my very, very untrained eye.
> 
> Could somebody who understands a RTL language try changing the
> "normal" style to use the font Dejavu-sans and setting the alignment
> to to right aligned?
> 
> You can change it via the format->styles dialog.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Martin
> 
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:10 PM, J.M. Maurer <uwog at uwog.net> wrote:
>> Did you actually try it? If I do, and try to insert text, it goes all
>> over the place (especially when inserting spaces)
>>
>>  Marc
>>
>> On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 17:09 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>>> Hi Marc,
>>>            Actually I think the bug is in the template files for
>>> arabic and other RTL languages. We explicitly set the text aligned to
>>> be left-aligned. The formatter needs to honour this request even for
>>> RTL languages because one can easily think of use cases where a RTL
>>> user wants to put text on the left side the document, like English
>>> speakers have the need for right-aligned text.
>>>
>>> Here is the template for  normal.awt-ar (Arabic locale)
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>> <styles>
>>> <s type="P" name="Normal" basedon="" followedby="Current Settings"
>>> props="font-family:Times New Roman; margin-top:0pt;
>>> font-variant:normal; margin-left:0pt; text-indent:0in; widows:2;
>>> font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none;
>>> color:000000; line-height:1.0; text-align:left; margin-bottom:0pt;
>>> text-position:normal; margin-right:0pt; bgcolor:transparent;
>>> font-size:12pt; font-stretch:normal"/>
>>> </styles>
>>> <pagesize pagetype="A4" orientation="portrait" width="210.000000"
>>> height="297.000000" units="mm" page-scale="1.000000"/>
>>> <section props="page-margin-right:1.0000in;
>>> page-margin-footer:0.5000in; page-margin-header:0.5000in;
>>> page-margin-left:1.0000in; page-margin-top:1.0000in;
>>> page-margin-bottom:1.0000in">
>>> <p style="Normal"></p>
>>> </section>
>>> </abiword>
>>> ------------------------------------
>>>
>>> See "text-align:left;" ? We explicitly ask for left-alignment even
>>> though we set the dominant direction to RTL.
>>>
>>> The solution is straight forward change the templates to set the
>>> property: "text-align:right;" for normal style. Since almost all our
>>> styles are basedon normal, the styles will inherit right-alignment as
>>> default.
>>>
>>> Tomas, do you have an opinion?
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:18 PM, J.M. Maurer <uwog at uwog.net> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 10:43 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>>>>> You also need to set the paragraph property of the template to be
>>>>> right aligned. That will put the caret on the right side the screen.
>>>> Try it yourself using "LANG=ar_AE.utf8 abiword". Either I don't
>>>> understand how RtL languages work, or we broke its behavior (I bet on
>>>> the latter).
>>>>
>>>> Arabic speaking people, could you test the following for me:
>>>>
>>>> 1) start abiword on a "normal PC" using LANG=ar_AE.utf8 abiword
>>>> 2) right align the paragraph (Format -> Align -> Right)
>>>> 3) type some words, and see if it behaves normally (cursor movement,
>>>> letter placement, inserting a space)?
>>>>
>>>> @Martin: we never needed to manually right align afaict. Sure, I can
>>>> make it part of the Normal style for arabic, but that means it breaks
>>>> all down again as soon as you use anything other than Normal (ie. one of
>>>> the built-in styles). I'm fairly sure we broke this. It should
>>>> auto-right align imo, and I think we used to do that.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers!
>>>>  Marc
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>