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Re: KDE 2 with Hebrew support



On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Ely Levy wrote:

> my posting is always mystrious here is a hacked spec made by Ilya and few
> things added by me
> 
> Looking for suggestions
> 
> I bet nadav would give up a page on ivrix to put it right?
> 
> As for the LDP we first working on a dictionary for techincal words
> and we need to decide if we going to translate initials or not
> like if IP would be ai pi in hebrew or peh alef
> I think that if you translate part you need to translate all
> other disagree with me..

I think it should either be IP or (in case this looks really bad) ai pi
 peh aleph (as in the Hebrew transcription of IBM) is really bad.

One other thing about LDP: Has anybody tried Hebrew with sgmltools ? 
I figure creating (logical) Hebrew text/html is trivial. However -
creating PS and PDF requires logical->visual translation.

Another possible docs format is latex.

> Hacked up specs of the Hebrew RedHat:

Do consider hacking Mandrake instead. One of Mandrake's strong points is
good localization. Another is its optimizatin for home users. I don't know
how much has RedHat cought-up in both fields.

(please keep this from becoming a mandrake-redhat flamewar :)

> 
> - BitchX with Hebrew compiled in

What is this Hebrew support? How much of this can be achived simply by
running it in an xterm with biditext, or in console with acon?

> - KDE 2, in the most sane version we can get at the moment
> where the Hebrew support works without any problems.

>From what I understand the "hebrew support" in KDE2 is support for logical
hebrew in the browser, a translation of the user interface to
(visual) Hebrew, and the use of unicode, which means much less font
settings are required.

Actually translating the user interface is not very hard. It can be done
as well for gnome, windowmaker, ice, and any other desktop. It would still
be visual Hebrew.

But there is a reason why this should not be done. When bidi support in QT
will hit the desktops, people using kde2 will complain that all of the
menus show reveresed Hebrew.

Back on topic...

You would need unicode fonts. It is not legal to put the MS fonts on the
CD. For those with windows on another partition - it is trivial to install
those fonts from windows. For the others - you'll probably find some
workaround.

Actually the whole Hebrew support there is not such a big deal:

If you installed Mandrake 7.1, chose "hebrew" as the language, and
installed iso8 fonts during the installtion, you would automatically get a
hebrew desktop:

The choise of hebrew as language also set the locale to "he". This means
that the default language of kde was hebrew. Mandrake also used a patch to
qt 1.44 which added the ability to set the default fonts according to the
locale. 

> - gtkbidi
> - Make menu entries for gedit, gnp load with gtkbidi

Last time I tried gedit 0.51 from andrake 6.1 was affected by gtkbidi, but
gedit 0.55 from mandrake 7.0 was no afcted.

> - Make GnomeICU load with gtkbidi
> (possibly, pack the new GnomeICU development version
> which fixes serious instabilities)
> 
> Involves changing:
> 	/etc/CORBA/servers/GnomeICU.gnorba
> and chaging there the "location_info" line to:
> 	location_info gtkbidi gnomeicu
> 
> - Hebrew licq (haven't seen it)

Anybody managed to get the qt-gui of licq to display hebrew? Ever since
they moved to unicode something there screwed up, at least for me. 
Well, there is also the gtk gui, but it is not as machure as the qt gui.

> 
> - Good ISO08 console fonts which include line drawing characters:
> 
> /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts
> 	iso08.f08.psf.gz
> 	iso08.f14.psf.gz
> 	iso08.f16.psf.gz
> 
> I already have a 16 one, and will dump the 8 and 14 ones
> hopefully.

Once you do that - please send them to the maintainer of the "kbd" package
(look in freshmeat). This will get them to all the distros.

> 
> - Good working Hebrew console keymap.

Check if the recent hebrew keymap in RH7 is not the correct one. Anyway -
if it is incorrect - also send the correct one to the maintainer of kbd.

> I think I have one which was quite fine for me for using
> Hebrew BitchX from plain console, switching via the 
> "Context-Menu" key on my Win95 keyboard.
> 
> - Hebrew X-compliant keymaps
> and Windows-style (Alt-Shift) switching (optional, along
> with original options)
> 
> Files to be updated/added:
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/keymap/xfree86
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/he
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/group
> 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/pc104

Some mre is required. You would want to add the hebrew layout in the list
of layouts, for instance.

See the iglu faq->hebrew->hebrew keyboard under X->xkb for some more (but
still incomplete) information.

BTW: Ilya - I was hoping that you could translate some of the xkb docs to
hebrew or english ;)

> ^ that's not required, but we CAN update it
>   so that the "Windows" keys would react as "Super-L"
>   and "Super-R" keys (which are originally Sun keyboard
>   keys AFAIK) instead of Meta-L and Meta-R.
>   That's since Emacs would use Meta-L and Meta-R over
>   Alt-L and Alt-R when available, and we don't wanna use
>   Windows keys for Emacs opreations, but the usual
>   ALT combinations.
> 
> (Possibly, tweak the X configuration tools to present Hebrew
> and the additional group-switching Alt-Shift sequence)

Again - see mandrake 7.1 , which contains a "il" map, and uses it if the
language is "hebrew". Note that that map is not entirely correct, and has
the wrong name (il instead of he), but it's a start.

You would also want the scroll-lock led to indicate the active group.

A couple of comments about hebrew xkb layout:
keep in mind that not all computers have a 104 keyboard.
check recent xfree 4.01 . It may already contain a "he" keymap. The xfree
3.3.6 will have to be patched.

Note that patching a package the "right way" would mean rebuilding XFree,
and using the Xlibs package built by you.

> 
> - Decent free hebrew fonts.
> Find out legal issues and whether we can ship Microsoft's fonts.
> In case of doubt, contact Microsoft. It couldn't get any worser :)

Not a chance they will let you distriburte them.

There's a small program called cabextract, that can extract the TTFs from
their exe files. Using it you can write a small script to download and
install those fonts.

As for other options:

xfree contains one fixed iso8 font.

You can also add the elmar fonts, which give a set of scalble iso8 fonts
(not of the best quality, but good enough to read menu items etc.)

There is a gnu project to create a (bitmap) unicode font. There's a link
to it from the "fonts" page at http://pango.org/

> 
> - Check for hebrew editor

Although vim is not what you meant - it is also an editor.
Add some hebrew-related config to .vimrc (maybe patch the etcskel
package) to get nice menu items in gvim, as well as some better key
bindings.

> 
> - Babylon and the dictionary files

There's a nice program called babytrans, that uses those dictionaries
under linux. Unfortunetly it currently has a fonts problem. Anybody wants
to solve this problem?

I believe the babylon installer is freely distributable (I haven't
checked, though).
Can those distionaries be extracted from there? Is it legal?

> 
> - Lyx and its hebrew support
> 
> - Mozzila or patched netscape

mozilla built with bidi support, *and* patched netscape 4.x

Is it legal to diustribute the patched netscape binary? Even if not -
would anybody care?

> 
> - Hebrew Ispell
> 
> - Hebrew support for emacs

emacs should be persuaded to treat hebrew_aleph etc. as hebrew chars. You
may also want to add the visual-hebrew emacs mode.

> 
> - Check the hebrew pine and maybe work for Unicode pine support

the curent hebrew pine is quite useless - it simply allows you to compose
messages in visual hebrew. This does not comply with the current
standards.

What is "unicode support in pine"?

> 
> - Check for translating the HOWTOs to hebrew
> 
> - Localize version of main programs

keep in mind that localizing means only adding a file with hebrew
strings. The main script need not be touched (at least for mandrake. But I
see no reason why would redhat take a different approach).

A couple of other things:

- biditext. Some more work should be done here in order to allow the use
of a custom file name instead of /tmp/.rev . Add some menu items for
biditext-ed programs.

- the gtkbeta packages (see the download page at http://pango.org/).
This is a version of gtk with bidi support.
Maybe even compile a couple of gtk programs with them .

- aedit - an arabic editor that uses that support
make it use Hebrew as well.

- acon - support for a bidi console. Basically you should use the package
from Mandrake, version >= 1.0.4 .
See a post by me to ivrix-discuss for more information

- If redhat's init scripts don't set the console fonts and console keymaps
properly - borrow that code from Mandrake.

- translate all desktops and menus. 
At least with mandrake - you can add translation for your language in the
menus system. I guess this is similar with redhat.

Hmmm... That's a long list...

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir


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