The attached patch is a proof-of-concept of fixing the muddled Arabic displays in partman using Unicode bidi control characters. It's not comprehensive, and it's actually not suitable for use as-is because the two strings involved are still inconsistent in their handling of the text "SCSI"; but it does introduce consistent use of parentheses and Arabic punctuation, and demonstrates how various control characters (U+202E, U+202A, U+202C) can be used to override the direction of otherwise LTR character sequences.
Christian, any chance you'd be able to test this out in d-i? My main d-i box remains an alpha w/o bterm support. Thanks, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
Index: partman/debian/po/ar.po
===================================================================
--- partman/debian/po/ar.po (revision 24176)
+++ partman/debian/po/ar.po (working copy)
@@ -439,14 +439,14 @@
#: ../partman.templates:252
#, no-c-format
msgid "SCSI%s (%s,%s,%s) (%s)"
-msgstr "SCSI%s )%sØ%sØ%s("
+msgstr "ââSCSI%sâ (%sØ%sØ%s) (%s)"
#. Type: text
#. Description
#: ../partman.templates:256
#, no-c-format
msgid "SCSI%s (%s,%s,%s), partition #%s (%s)"
-msgstr "ØÙØÙ%s (%s,%s,%s), ØÙØÙØØØØ #%s (%s)"
+msgstr "âØÙØÙ%s (%sØ%sØ%s)Ø ØÙØÙØØØØ #%s (%s)"
#. Type: text
#. Description
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
