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Re: Bidi support for Linux



Hi Mati, Heetz and everybody

On Mon, 7 May 2001, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> Mati, Rega Ehad ;)
> 
> > The suggestions we received can be classified as follows:
> 
> I'm affraid you're either mixing or stepping on other toes (projects that are 
> done or being done)
> 
> > Basic Support:
> >      Keyboard mapping 
>
> already done. Look inside XFree 4.0.3 or the upcoming XFree-4.1
>

XFree has the backend (config files for xkbcomp). There is an obvious need
for better front-ends for Xkb, that will fully utilize it (more than
switch layout. For instance: use mouse-keys, set keys for layout
switching, scroll-lock led indicator).

But this is certainly not a high-priority task.

> >      Fonts
>
> Someone from KDE is working on adding the Windows fonts. 
> Mandrake also have a nice utility to add Windows fonts to your Linux. Debian 
> got a smart package to download fonts from MS and to install it. Why do 
> duplicate work?

Fonts is a major problem. Even for a home system this complicates settings
(what will you set for the default font of kde? the ugly "fixed"? After
bothering that much with adding antialising ? ;-) ).

For a more-than-hobbyist environemnt (which may be what IBM is aiming for)
such solutions will simply not do.

However, such a font will not be made availble by extra programmer time
(and I believe that this post was about investment of programmers time)

> >      UTF-8 
>
> why?? everything is now unicode including QT 3 and GTK 2
>
> > GUI
> >      QT/KDE
> >      GTK/Gnome
>
> care to elaborate? you might (again) want to do 
> some stuff that someone is already doing

Hetz: you originally asked about adding bidi support to the existing kde2

Anybody tried to see if such a task is feasable?
 
> 
> > Applications 
> >      Word processor
>
> Abiword got already some bidi support. I think a  little help is needed there
> >      Emacs

(There's a bidi-emacs effort, for those of you who don't remember)

> >      Vim
>
> I think there is a hebrew version of vim available.
>

See my original comments about that version

> >
> 
> > Internet
> >      Browser (this is not really needed, since the Bidi-enabled Mozilla is
> > now released) 
> True.
> 
> >
> > Porting Tools
> >      Wine
>
> Umm, to do hebrew for wine, you don't need much work actually, you can ask 
> the team that did the OS/2 hebrew support to give it to you. Same algoritms 
> with minor changes that were reflected on Windows 9x. But IMHO I would put 
> wine Hebrew efforts in the last priority (heck, you don't have there even 
> decent fonts support for any language)

[I'm not sure that this is correct, but I have a feeling that Mati knows
more about this]

> 
> > As you can see, this is quite a demanding list.  We are currently weighing
> > our options, before jumping into concrete work.  I will send updated info
> > when a decision is taken.
> 
> Well Mati, as you can see, your list has been shrinking now ;)

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


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