Re: ASAP old Project

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Az Soliman" <az_soliman@yahoo.com> writes:

> I am new on pango and my manager asked me to be a cooperator on a
> programmer team to introduce Arabic script on linux using pango. If
> there is any finished projects or any examples that uses pango to
> show other languages please send it to me. If there is any help that
> you can give please do send me. I need to be familiar with pango at
> least before two weeks.

I'm sorry for the slow response.

In general, Pango support for Arabic is pretty good; there are a few
bugs in it, but it mostly is complete. If you support Pango, you
will support Arabic.

However, Pango is not yet in widespread use. The first major project
to use Pango the next version of the GTK+ toolkit which is scheduled
for release towards the end of the summer.

In general, I suspect that most use of Pango will be done
initially through using GTK+. The steps in preparing a program
for Arabic support via GTK+ will be:

 - Porting the program to the new release of GTK+
 - Making sure all handling of text properly uses Unicode 
 - Creating Arabic translations for the program

To get some idea of what this release will look like, you can
install the snapshot RPMS from 

 http://www.pango.org/download.shtml

There is a sample text editor 'testtext' included with the
program which can be used to test out input and display of Arabic
via the GTK+ text widget. 

Regards,
                                        Owen