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Re: Hebrew task list



In your message from [Mon, 12 Jun 1995 19:25:17 +0300] you wrote:
> ===> Dov Grobgeld writes on Jun 12,  8:27am :
> ===>
> ===> Subject : Hebrew task list
> ==>
> => 
> => * Reverse screen support in emacs 19.28 .
> => 
> => * Support for right to left text in Tk. This may involve several levels.
> =>   The simplest is the possibility to just reverse the text in the
> =>   widget. More fancy options would be to introduce tags denoting 
> =>   right-to-left portions, like TeX--XeT.
> =>   
> => * Support of reverse geometry in the Athena widgets. That is, nothing
> =>   fancy, just a flag to be able to reverse the screen like in the editors
> =>   hed/rsvim. This is by the way not that simple, I looked in to it once,
> =>   and the screen direction assumptions are deeply burried in several
> =>   nested levels.
> 
> Is this the best way to go? I am not that sure, I think this deserves some
> thought.

Are you referring to the Athena widgets or to all of the above? It might be
worth looking into the way that Hebrew Motif was written. Does anyone know
any details about it? Perhaps there could be a discussion on this in the
next meeting. 

> => 
> => * A Hebrew line printer program for postscript. I could easily make such
> =>   a program if I knew of any free fixed-pitched type1 font.
> => 
> 
> If you mean a program that converts Hebrew text to postscript I have one.
> It is originally meant for translating output meant for Epson printers to
> postscript. Therefore, it also translates some Epson escape sequences.
> The only problem is that this program uses DOS Hebrew encoding (0x80-0x9a),
> this can be fixed by piping through tr. I may have even included an
> option in the program to use the 0xe0-0xfa unix Hebrew encoding.
> 
> The program should compile on any unix which gcc and runs on DOS too.

Thanks. I'll rip out the font (pun unintentional) from it and write my 
own perl program with it. Unfortunately this is only a type3 font, which 
is much worse than type1 at small sizes. So the question remains if there 
exists a free type1 Hebrew fixed pitch font?

> IMHP some further goals should be: 
> 
> * Fixing the bugs in hxterm (for instance, underlining behaves bad when in 
>       right to left mode).  
> 
> * Getting a bi-lingual bi-directional editor. Dov's version of vim should 
>   cover this.  

Personally, I really wouldn't mind Emacs as well. ;-)

> 
> * Hebrew support for WWW clients. I am not sure about the situation here.  
>   Is there a general solution on the way? I do not know of a text describing 
>   the current situation with a HOWTO.  

The question is to begin with whether there will be any right-to-left support 
in forthcoming HTML specifications. I have looked a couple of times at planned
features for HTML 3.0, and have never seen anything about right-to-left. But
perhaps I just missed it. Could someone quote a reliable source on this?

Once the protocol is has been accepted, I believe that both Mosaic and 
Netscape will do the job of writing the clients for us.

> 
> * Fonts: the range of available Hebrew fonts for X is small. Especially 
>   fonts which are suitable for xterm. I think that we should collect fonts 
>   and convert fonts from various sources to X fonts. Is it true that there 
>   can be no legal rights on fonts? (only on the software that uses the fonts) 

I included some Hebrew bdf fonts in the vimrs distribution that were 
automatically translated from PC BIOS fonts. I believe that you can't
copyright bitmaps, in which case it would be perfectly ok to just grab 
all the bitmap fonts e.g. from AIX.

> * XeT/LaXeT maintenance 
> 
> Gili

Since you have a www page, couldn't merge our suggestions together and
put them into a Hebrew task list on your server? Shouldn't document 
translation be put into the list as well?

--
Dov Grobgeld             Email: dov@orbotech.co.il
The Rainbow Project, Orbotech
Yavne, Israel