--- ben sassi rakia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Can someone help me by tell how can we "arabiser" a software, the > differents ways to program and show letters in arabic language?
This is a rather complex question that can't really be answered in a few lines/paragraphs, but we can provide some insight on what is required/needed for you to go read more about the various topics. Arabic is a Right-to-Left (RTL) language which more likely than not is accompanied with latin text (english, french, german, etc) which are Left-to-Right strings resulting in a problem - how does one display both texts on the same page ? Bidirectionality (Bidi for short) is the answer that Unicode [1] has provided that the majority of software out there uses. The specification [2] is available as are a number of sample implementations and actual real world libraries and applications (akin to Fribidi and miniBidi among others). The encoding that the characters use (how a particular character is stored in memory or disk) also needs to be specified - UTF-8 is a rather common all encompassing character encoding (translates a character to a set of bytes) and is highly supported (you can view the Arabic character-set sans encoding here [3]). Last but not least is the need for the Arabic characters to be molded (the same Arabic character looks different depending on where it is within a word) and this process is called shaping (or less common known as joining). Shaping is so fundamental that is doesn't have a stand-alone library (yet) and is not specified by any consortium which leaves developers completely free to develop whatever they see fit. So in short, look into unicode's Bidi spec, unicode's character maps, the various encoding methods and the general shaping (Arabic language) requirements. There are plenty of good examples out there in terms of libraries and/or application that one can look into to learn (some might be overwhelming (ICU, pango come to mind :-) others are less demanding). Hope that helps (I know this is NOT complete, but it is a start). Salam. [1] http://www.unicode.org [2] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9 [3] http://www.unicode.org/charts - Nadim __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
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