Re: A Question about Farsi

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 13:10, Agahi Houman wrote:
> Hi, I am using GNOME version 2.2. I was trying to make
> some changes in it, so that it displays all messages
> (such as messages for log out, or something like that)
> and everything in Farsi. There's a
> problem here and it's that I can't type farsi properly
> in GNOME. I was searching the internet and it seems
> that GNOME v2.2 supports farsi, but when I export the
> farsi LANGUAGE and open the gedit all farsi
> characters on the menu bar are detached. I even copy
> some farsi text from internet and paste it in gedit,
> it can't even display them properly, it just detaches
> the characters. I mean it doesn't display
> the whole word it just displays the letters separate
> from each other.
> I would really appreciate if anybody could tell me
> what's wrong here, or if there's any easier way to use
> farsi in GNOME v2.2

This is likely a font configuration problem; if you
have fonts on your system that have Arabic glyphs but
don't have the proper OpenType tables, then Fontconfig,
unless told otherwise, may use these fonts.

What you should do is edit /etc/fonts/local.conf, and 
make it read something like:

====
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->
<fontconfig>
        <alias>
                <family>sans-serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>KacstBook</family>
                </prefer>
        <alias>
        <alias>
                <family>serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>KacstBook</family>
                </prefer>
        <alias>
        <alias>
                <family>monospace</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>KacstBook</family>
                </prefer>
        <alias>
</fontconfig>
===

(Untested sorry.) Use the font you actually want to prefer
for displaying Farsi. This should get things working in the
fa_IR locale. 

(Things still won't work for en_US because of some fontconfig issues.
But we'll have those worked around for Pango-1.4.)

Regards,
					Owen