Re: GTK internationalization, right-to-left languages

[Nimrod Zimerman <zimerman earthling net>]

On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 05:06:48PM -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:

> As I recall, the Apple HCI guidelines have examples showing Arabic
> dialogs which are mirrored about their vertical axis (as compared to
> English-language dialogs).  If this really is desirable for r-to-l
.
.
.

Good to know I'm not the first to come up with that method. See my previous
post, about a minute ago. <g>

> I've never seen an r-to-l environment running, nor do I use any such
> language, so I have no idea whether this is truly desirable.

It appears as if it is quite useful.

> For most text in a UI you won't need to worry about changes in
> direction.  That's because most text comes from a single language.

The problem is that right to left languages are crazy by nature. In both
Arabic and Hebrew, numbers are entered left to right, as opposed to other
text (just imagine how complicated it is to write a mathematical document
and add a formula in the middle of the text, by hand. You have to either
right it from the end, or correctly guess its size...). This complicates
things and calls for smart algorithms. In Hebrew MS-Word, for example,
handling of numbers (or English) in an Hebrew text is usually not too smart,
and unless you understand how the programs thinks, you can fight with it
quite a bit until you can place a character where you actually want it to
appear. I've seen better implementations.

> The Unicode standard has a chapter on rendering multi-language text.
> It is quite complicated.  If somebody is seriously considering
> implementing this, I'd recommend buying and reading the Unicode book
> as a sensible first step.

This might be a good idea, but one can possibly do without it.

                                                   Nimrod