Re: (no subject)

["Ali Abdin" <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

> Hi,
>  I don't think there is anyone working on Arabic support, even though I'd
love to help with translations when that happens.
>
>  However there is pango. I think Owen Taylor works on it. The address of
the project is www.pango.org
>
>  When I can write in arabic under gnome, please let me know so that I can
help with translations.

This may suprise you - but, yes you can type Arabic in GNOME :) get the
'snapshot' RPMS from the pango.org (its okay to install, they A) go into
/opt/pango prefix and B) have a different RPM name so won't overwrite any
old stuff).

Anyway, I also contributed an arabic.xkb keymap - so if you have a
'somewhat' identical keyboard to mine, you can type in Arabic :) oh - one
thing you need a Unicode fotn with Arabic support (clearlyu) - it comes by
default in XFree86 4.0 - but in prior versions you will need to download and
install it manually.

Oh, also, another problem. I couldn't get it to type Arabic by default. Owen
informed me a file to edit (basically, I had to add the font I used to a
file, since it wasn't there by default cos it screwed up spacing on Owen's
system or something like that).

Anyway - there is a 'testtext' binary file in /opt/pango/bin  that you can
run - I /think/ it is the pango-ized version of Havocs text widget - but I
could be wrong. But anyway, it is a very very _VERY_ _VERY_ simplistic text
editor, so you could THEORETICALLY load up a .pot file or something and
localize applications to Arabic (for the upcoming GNOME 2.0).

the 'LC_ALL' variable for Arabic is 'AR' - and remember you can have things
like 'ar_EG' for Egyptian Arabic, or 'ar_KW' for Kuwaiti Arabic - much like
you can have an en_US, en_GB, or just plain 'en' :)

When GNOME 2.0/Gtk+ 1.4 come out, I am willing to 'volunteer' to try and get
some sort of Arabic i18n team formed (under gnome-i18n). If I can't get one
formed for whatever reason - I'll just localize myself to Arabic :P

Ali Abdin