Re: Typing Right-To-Left language characters in GtkEntry

[Alem Dain <alem dain gmail com>]

Hmmm, with almost no work at all, I managed to type right-to-left in
Arabic (not that I know a word of it...)

For the purpose of input, no locale information is necessary.  All you
need is the appropriate keyboard mapping loaded in X, as well an an
Arabic-capable unicode font; Pango knows how to render right-to-left
text.

More interesting than the version of Linux you are running are the
versions of GTK and Pango.  As for the keyboard map, I'm not familiar
with the inner workings of xmodmap; I recommend XKB.  You use this
program to dynamically change the keyboard mapping as though you had
edited XF86Config.

So what I did was functionally equivalent to:

setxkbmap -rules xfree86 -model pc104 -layout en,ar -option grp:menu_toggle

Just a quick explanation may be required here.  Most likely you will
leave the "rules" and "model" option alone; if you have something
other than a standard keyboard (with the extra Windows keys) you will
want to change that.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure where you find a
list of other models.  Anyway, the important ones is "layout".  It
specifies that the first one should be english (basic), and the
second, arabic (basic).  You can have up to for.  I like to use the
Menu key to toggle, hence the "-option grp:menu_toggle" bit.

What I in fact did was ran a little GTK program I've written that does
all these things for me, as well as displaying the current keyboard
layout... whee :)  Source code can be provided, fixed bugs would be
most appreciated :)

....

Now, you also need an Arabic capable Unicode font.  If you are typing
characters appropriately, but lack the font, you'll see little squares
with four digits in them, representing the otherwise unrepresentable
unicode character.  What Unicode font supports Arabic?  I use James
Kass's Code2000 (just google for it).  It's free, and it also supports
Tengwar (again, whee).  I'm sure there are thousands of other fonts
that have Arabic, tho.  In fact, in might come with ... whatever X
comes with.

Hope this helps,
Adam.

On 6/8/05, Gaurav Jain <gaurav anywhere gmail com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I need to enter Right-To-Left language characters (such as Arabic and
> Hebrew) in a GtkEntry widget.  I'm using Red Hat Linux 9.0 and have
> logged in the Arabic language session.  I then set the locale to
> "ar_SA.utf8".  Then I run my small GTK program which has a GtkEntry
> widget.
>
> But I'm stuck at this point where I need an input method to enter the
> arabic characters.  Could somebody help?
>
> (I tried using xmodmap to load an arabic keyboard mapping, but then
> nothing happened.  I also need to know where I can get arabic fonts
> from, if required).
>
> Thanks,
> Gaurav
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