Re: Pango status, arabic support

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com> writes:

> Kaixo!
> 
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 11:25:13PM +0000, Hassan Aurag wrote:
> 
> > > It was asked on this list if it is possible to write arabic
> > > "under gnome". If one is willing to compile gtk+ with pango-support,
> > > it will work.
> > > I have not gotten any feed-back of the sort
> > >   "the shaper produces something strange in situation X",
> > > so I might assume it is more-than-less ok :)
> > 
> >  Ok, I am ready for testing, but not for compiling. Does one really 
> > need to recompile gtk+?
> >  Is it possible to get one big fat statically linked tar.gz of pango?
> 
> You can try to get the pre-compiled snapshots from http://www.gnome.org/;
> they are in rpm format compiled for Linux/i386. Note however that, as often
> with projects in heavy development, some things can improve or broke from
> one version to the other; and you may in some cases want to experiment with
> the latest sources from CVS (in gtk-pango branch of gtk+ module)
 
Actually, the gtk-pango branch of GTK+ has been merged into the HEAD
branch of GTK+. The gtk-pango branch is effectively dead and if you
want to try stuff from CVS, you should be using the HEAD branch. 

Right now, CVS is not very different from the last snapshots
I put on pango.org in this regard. I'm going to try and keep the
snapshots up to date as things evolve until we have a final
release of GTK+-1.4.

> I have, however, one question: which encoding should be used for the po files?
> There is some people voluntering to translate the po file of Gtk+ to Arabic;
> should it be done in utf-8 or iso-8859-6 ?

I think utf-8 is the definitely the right encoding for .po files for
languages like Arabic where there is nota large community using a
legacy encoding on Linux, and where there are not .po files already
out there.

> And what about existing po files, must they be converted to utf-8 before
> release of gtk+ 1.4 ?

That would be simplest. The latest versions of gettext for GNU libc 2.2
have the ability to translate .po files on the fly, but we can't
rely on that being there.

Regards,
                                        Owen