[Localization] Arabic Font Status

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
> 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.

I don't know how we are going to reimplement collaboration, tables,
other formats import/export, etc

The Abiword project is one of the FOSS projects that has actively
contributed most to OLPC and I for one am very grateful of their
support, let's try to have a more positive attitude towards fellow
contributors.

Khaled, how could Abiword improve in Arabic support? Do you have any
idea about how to resource that work?

[cc'ing Abiword's Martin and OLPC's Greg]

Thanks,

Tomeu