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Hebrew support (was information)
I've seen the discussion of Hebrew support, not only now, but for
several years. I'd say - forget about Motif. Go for Gtk. The only
free serious application using Motif that we are interested in is
Netscape/Mozilla, and there the internationalization issues are
already being covered (albeit slowly and not in time for Netscape
5.0). For Linux GTk is the way to go.
No, GTk is the way to go. I spoke to Richard Stallman about it when I
was at Usenix this summer in New Orleans. "Do it!" he said. "Decide on
one single widget and make it Bidi Complient. Others will write other
widgets". I wish I had the time. I still hope that one day I might
find the time.
Here's in my opinion what needs to be done:
1. Get the Unicode book.
2. Implement the BiDi algorithm very clearly in high level scripting
language with strong string processing, e.g. perl. The result
should be a function given a Unicode string with implicit and
explicit BiDi rules outputs a visual string.
3. Translate the BiDi algorithm into a C-library.
4. Merge the library into GTk/Tk/LessTif. Or if you believe in KDE
convince Trolls to incorporate your changes into Qt.
That's it! Who is going to do it. :-)
Dov