Re: new to list / text handling / bidi

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

Amir> I wanted to ask you what internationalization features are there
Amir> in Gnome, and particularly - are there any bidirectional
Amir> capabilities.

Gnome uses gettext for message translation and POSIX facilities for
other locale-specific info.

Bidi text is not currently handled (and Gtk/Gnome doesn't use Unicode
internally yet).  There's been a couple discussions in the past about
what would be required for localization to right-to-left environments
(Arabic and Hebrew, basically) on the Gtk list.  If you really want to
work on it, I recommend reading the archives.  Owen Taylor had some
specific implementation recommendations that would probably be worth
your while to read.

Amir> I'd volunteer to any project in that area as Arabic and Hebrew
Amir> speakers are often discriminated (especially the latter and i
Amir> happen to be one :)

I think it's safe to say that Gnome would welcome an implementation of
this feature.

Amir> Also: is there something like Windows' string tables in
Amir> LiNUX/Motif/Gnome development tools?

Yes.  The GNU world uses the GNU gettext library, which is a message
catalog facility.

Tom