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Re: Bidi support for Linux



On Monday 16 April 2001 05:23, matial@il.ibm.com wrote:
> IBM (my employer) has, as you may know, vested interest in Linux.  Many of
> its products are now designed to run (also) on Linux.  For these products
> to succeed on the Israeli market, Linux needs to have a reasonable support
> for Hebrew (Bidi).  IBM is ready to invest a significant amount of
> developers time in order to improve the Bidi support in Linux.  Everybody
> will benefit.

Glad to hear that ;)

>
> The team to which I belong has extensive experience of Bidi support,
> including in Unix (Motif), but quite limited acquaintance with Linux.

Thats ok, you at least have the Unix knowledge ;)

>
> My question is for the seasoned Linux users in this newsgroup:  where
> should we invest our efforts to make the most good?  I know, from
> subscribing to this newsgroup for a while, that some Bidi support already
> exists or is in development, but I have no organized list.   We want to
> avoid duplicating work already done or in progress.  We want suggestions
> about which components are most important.  Our aim here is development
> tools (KDE, Gnome, etc...) rather than end-user applications (like a word
> processor or a picture editor).  Now is your chance to ask for the Bidi
> support that you always wanted and never had time to do yourself!  You may
> suggest as many items as you wish, but it will help if you can prioritize
> as "Vital", "Important", "Nice to have", etc...
>
> Of course, we don't have unlimited resources, and we don't commit to
> anything, but I assure you than I am not wasting your time, and we do
> intend to help improve the Bidi support in Linux.
>
> If there is some other lists where I should ask this question, please give
> me pointers.

Ok, pointers, I'll be happy to share pointers with you..

First, you're coming at some "odd" timing - QT 3.0 which have bidi support 
will come out soon as an official beta (snapshots are available on their 
FTP). However, it will take at least 12-18 months until you'll see KDE uses 
QT-3.0 since it's not entirely backward binary compatible (it's around %70 if 
I'm not mistaken), so the KDE team won't use it for KDE 2.x versions at all 
and it will take time until you'll see KDE 3.0 (and that KDE will be probably 
mostly incompatible with KDE 2.x)

So, I see it as a "vital" - we need some bidi support which needs to be 
back-ported from QT 3 to QT 2.x. - is this going to be hard? not much. The 
rich widgets of QT 3 have been back ported to KDE 2.2 in 2 days.

GTK - same story here - GTK 1.3.x has been declared as "feature freeze" and 
will be included with GNOME 2.0 - again - in something like 12-18 months from 
now. As much as I know - it has unicode support, but not sure about BiDi 
support. Ilya? could you give some more details about it?

If you want to use hebrew in right-to-left with GTK - then you'll need to use 
Dov's Fri-bidi implementation + Matan hacks (Dov? Matan? could you give few 
more details to the IBM guys?)

The important stuff:

* Mozilla - I have seen that IBM's code is now inside the normal mozilla, but 
it's still not compilable with it. It takes ages to fix those compilation 
bugs (it's still not compiling here - tested 3 days ago). A speed up would be 
definately helpful.

* Konqueror - although it got Visual and Logical hebrew support - once you 
have an english word inside a sentence - you'll get all the line mixed up. I 
have talked to the author of the bidi inside Konqueror, and he says he cannot 
do anything since it's hack on a hack and "everything will be much better 
once everyone will move to QT 3.0 [sounds familiar?]", so if IBM is willing 
to port the Bidi from QT 3 to KDE or QT 2.x, then those fixes could be done 
quickly.

* keyboard switching - it sounds trivial, but you'll be amazed how much it's 
not. KDE got this weird combination of CTRL-ALT-K, while I didn't see 
anything in GNOME about it. Also, You must make sure you have the hebrew map 
in your XFree to support it, and support it correctly (there are 3 maps 
around!). A small application which could dock inside both KDE-2, GNOME, and 
Window Maker could help a lot.

the "Would be nice":

* Well, it would be nice if IBM decides to back port the Bidi from QT 3.0 and 
assist with KOffice, so we might finally have a good word processor with 
Hebrew. I know you're taking word processor as a lower priority, but belive 
me, this is one of the most frequent ask questions from students who wants to 
write their thesis, or work, and they have to switch to Windows and buy Word. 

As for Motif support with Hebrew - this part has done by Elmar software and 
Eli Marmor, Eli - could you give some details please?

Thanks, and sorry for the long email.

Hetz

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