--- Ahmed Ghoneim <ahmed.ghoneim - gmail.com> wrote: > On 7/24/07, Nadim Shaikli <shaikli - yahoo.com> wrote: > > Mr. Ghoneim/khalifa/et al, how about it ? > > Sure! It's a big project, but we can rely on the expertise around > here for support. > > Personally, I don't have much experience with cygwin, as I only > use linux or the native mingw on windows. But i understand the > project's importance as a starting point for windows users.
Wonderful - I hope others will also join in this effort to not only test things out and report back but to actually join in the development. I've made some progress (well discoveries) that might get us going sooner than I thought - yes that's reason for excitement :-) As almost everyone is now well aware - to properly support Arabic one needs a couple of key ingredients, A. UTF-8 support B. Bidirectional (Bidi) support C. Proper fonts and handling there-of So I started looking at cygwin's UTF-8 support to see what's out there and if others have gone down this path and to my surprise I found out that _many_ people have in the past and that some have even submitted patches to the cygwin project which unfortunately so-far have been rejected not due to the concept but due to approach/code-style (more on this later). So to make a long story short there very much is a working UTF-8 cygwin model as is noted here, http://www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin So let me give a step-by-step instructional to note what I've done so far (to get others moving along as well) and an action plan to see how we can progress. 1. Do a "normal/proper" cygwin install from cygwin.com [1] - make sure you install the necessary X libraries and applications so you can start xterms 2. Make sure you have an Arabic UTF-8 file handy. You can grab this sample from awhile back for testing purposes, http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/ar_utf8 4. See the mess we have _today_ with regard to cygwin and Arabic and try to view the ar_utf8 file using less/more/cat/vim/emacs/etc % less ar_utf8 5. Let's get cygwin to recognize utf-8, so shut everything down and replace 'cygwin1.dll' with Suzuki's version (.jp link above). 6. Download arabeyes' fixed-width/mono-spaced fonts [2] and copy the 10x21.pcf within cgywin's install directory in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc (you might want to gzip it) and then run the following command for the applications to find the font % xset +fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc 7. Now let's start an xterm that is unicode aware using our font (you can include these command-line options within your .Xdefaults if you so desire and xrdb them into affect) % xterm -u8 \ -fn -arabeyes-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1 with this new xterm repeat step #4 and you should see Arabic non-joined, non-bidi'ed characters - wooohooo !! a. For vim (shaped results) make sure to do, :set encoding=utf-8 :set arabic 8. Celebrate and jump for joy -- we're 60% there :-) So what needs to happen you ask ? Well, now the fun part begins and this will require a bit of elbow grease from our end (ie. development, compilation, packaging, etc) and a bit of talking and communicating with the cygwin developers (both of which we, thankfully, have experience with within arabeyes). Here is what I've been able to come-up with (a TODO list), 1. We need to get various Bidi libraries running natively within cygwin. Let's start with porting Fribidi [3] as that is the base for a lot of applications out there. Once fribidi is compiled and available we should be able to see proper Bidi'ed Arabic files (some applications, like vim, etc do their own shaping so we can leverage that). In passing, we need to continue asking Fribidi developers to fold-in the shaping functions. 2. We need to compile/port mlterm to run natively (with fribidi linked-in) so we can run 'less' or 'cat' on Arabic files and see their actual contents - bidi and all. mlterm brings a great amount of functionality to the table so its a must have. 3. Communicate with the cygwin community on what we can do to get the UTF-8 patch incorporated into the cgywin main trunk (ie. for it to simply be offered natively with every download). This might require us to recode and/or to rework the patch which might mean talking and working with Mr. Sukuzi if he still has interest. 4. We'll have to ask the cygwin community to incorporate into their various repositories our 10x21 font as well as fribidi, mlterm and any other applications we deem useful for our Bidi and Arabic needs. Having more Arabic font options here would also be nice. 5. We'll need to go through the various applications cygwin already has in their repository to Bidi'fy them (for instance fvwm, the window manager, should be recompiled to include fribidi as a library). This step is not mandatory but it nicely complete what we need to accomplish. I've been asked about completion expectations before so here is my opinion on how this will inshalla progress (given enough support, developers and testers of course), Steps complete Percentage done Potential Effort Time estimate ---------------+-----------------+------------------+--------------- 1 70% Easy/Moderate 1 week 2 80% Easy/Moderate 2 weeks 3 90% Very Hard 2-3 months 4 95% Hard 1 month 5 100% Hard 1 month As is always the case, the more difficult parts are the convince jobs that need to take place but if we've done our homework right it should be relatively easy (the more we communicate with cygwin and the more we cater to their requests the easier all of this will be). Keep in mind that its always hard to convince people to include functions/files/libraries into their applications or repositories which they, on average, have no usage for. Hope all of this makes sense (report back if my outlined steps don't work). If there is interest (and I sure hope so since this now seems more doable than ever), I can start a cygwin sub-project on arabeyes (should we ?) to track things and to simplify newbie introductions. Mr. Ghoneim, can you please take care of #1/#2 above ? You have the proper required win32 compilations experience (it will probably also take you a bit to get cygwin's X running since you've never done it though its rather simple). If you'd like to talk and/or have a quickie howto on IRC, let me know. I'll try to send a longer email next time around ;-) BTW: in replies do please only cite relevant portions of emails. [1] http://cygwin.com/setup.exe [2] http://downloads.sourceforge.net/arabeyes/ae_fonts_mono.tar.bz2 [3] http://fribidi.freedesktop.org/wiki/ Salam. - Nadim ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545433 _______________________________________________ Developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer
