[Localization] Arabic Font Status

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 08:03:45PM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Sayamindu, Khaled et al,
> >
> > Is there a new Arabic font in 8.2-765?
> >
> > I have a volunteer to help test Arabic but I'm waiting until the new
> > font is in before she starts testing.
> >
> > Let me know the status.
> >
> > Also, let me know who else can try it out in this release.
> >
> > If Arabic is not ready yet we can shoot for 8.2.1. The sooner we make it
> > work well, the better. 500 x XOs were already handed out in Lebanon and
> > more will go to Arabic speaking countries before the end of 2008.
> >
> 
> The new fonts are in 8.2-764 and above.
> 
> I cannot read Arabic, but one of the still unresolved issues from what
> I can see from the UI is the icon mirroring problem (#6562)
> 
> Also, during testing Arabic in Write activity, you'll have to
> specifically select the Arabic font before doing anything (#2207).
> Note that is not an issue which can always be reproduced - sometimes
> the characters show up properly, and sometimes they don't.

Those all are AbiWord bugs, unfortunately AbiWord has a very fragile
font fallback system and buggy OpenType layout as well.
This shouldn't only affect Arabic, but may be other languages as well.

I sometimes wonder do we really need AbiWord? I think most of the
features that we use in Write can be implemented with gtk.TextView, but
I did no real investigation on this.

> 
> We also need some more translations. Khaled, any comments on that ? ;-)

Well, Glucose is fully translated (some sugar strings that appear in
console only were intentionally left out), all Fructose activities except
Calculate are translated too and we have a full Scratch translation as
well.

One of Alexandria guys should be working on Etoys but that is huge task
and I didn't here from him recently.

I've been trying to "recruit" more Arabic translators (since I don't 
have time to do more translation myself) but either I'm a bad recruiter
or Arabs has no interest on OLPC ;)

Regards,
 Khaled


-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team
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