[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Bidi support for Linux



On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> 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.
> >
> > The team to which I belong has extensive experience of Bidi support,
> > including in Unix (Motif), but quite limited acquaintance with Linux.
> >
> > 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 orin 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 toKDE 2.2 in 2 days.

Actually I remember I read somewhere that Lars wrote that he backported
everything in those widgets that was trivial to backport (which was -
everything but the bidi stuff). 

But I figure Hetz would know better...

> 
> 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?

Actually, gtk 1.2 does not use unicode internally, so the task here may be
more complicated. gtk 2.0 is a quite complete rewrite.

So adding bidi support to gtk 1.2 could prove more difficult.

But I agree that if any of those two tasks is feasable, it should have the
highest priority.

> 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?)

Actually, Dov's gtkbidi hack works quite nicely (for a hack, that is), but
breaks for later versions of gtk. 

See:

http://www.iglu.org.il/faq/cache/130.html

Any idea how much work would it involve to "update" gtkbiditext? Dov, do
you think it is worth it?

> 
> 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.

The code is currently reviwed by the mozilla folks, and being checked in.
It still does not compile.

> * 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.

Nothing much to do with bidi, though.

Conrolling the keyboard language is done on the level of X, no of
gnome/kde .

The desktop environment could add its own controls and config tools.

I only recently noticed that WindowMaker can optionally allow you to
set the active keymap on a per-window basis. It would be nice if someone
were to implement this feature, or something similar, in other window
managers.

> 
> 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. 

Writing a thesis with word? I thought that this is what latex is for? (and
lyx, for those who don't want to confront latex). See, e.g.
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~yogi/latex.html (sorry, couldn't help it).

I think that bidi support in a word processor requires some extra
programming beyond the bidi support in a widget, because a word processor
handles text differently than a simple text widget.

Besides KOffice, there is also OpenOffice (which is more of a vapourware
at this point).

But consider that at the moment you have LyX, and AbiWord will soon
follow, hopefully.

Another issue with word processors is fonts. But this is not directly
related to bidi.

As for other toolkits: what others exist (and are worth the time
spending?)

* motif? I think it is used almost only by legacy commercial apps
* Xaw: Used by many legacy apps

Any idea what is the bidi code sun said they would release (as part of the
second part of the X code they release)

There are a couple of other toolkits, that are not very widely used, and
I'm not sure that adding bidi to them is a high priority.

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


=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request@linux.org.il with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request@linux.org.il