Hi Kerry,
Thanks for your detailed reply, seems there is a real problem with
the lack of rtl support. I found one idea online which I thought
might be a shot, see it here: http://broadcast.artificialcolors.com/
index.php?title=flash_rtl_via_a_simple_hack_non_rhetoric
The only free-text fields I would need are name and email address,
the rest of the options are combo boxes which I could do in arabic
simply by having the letters in there as a graphic.
Do you think I might be able to use something like the idea above for
a simple name and email address? As I don't think there should be and
bi-di in there, just rtl.
Thanks,
Piers
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 12 Mar 2008, at 16:32, Kerry Thompson wrote:
Piers Cowburn wrote:
I'm working on a pitch for a viral campaign for one of the larger
charities and one of the points on the brief is that it needs to be
accessible to anyone working in different languages and character
sets, what ever they may be.
There will be an element of data collection involved and I was just
wondering if anyone has any experience/advice for working with Flash
and user entry in a number of different character sets? For instance
I know with Arabic the shapes of letters change depending on their
place in a word, etc.
The Flash player currently doesn't support bi-di languages like
Arabic,
Farsi, or Hebrew. Francis Cheng has told us that they're working on
it, and
it will be out soon, but for now, no Arabic input. (I could be
wrong, but I
think Urdu and Pashtoo are also r-t-l).
The issue with Arabic isn't just that the letters change shape.
It's also
mostly right-to-left, but quotes from a ltr language are inserted
left to
right. You can imagine the complications there. Plus, I believe that
numerals are ltr, which makes for some interesting issues identifying
decimals vs. periods.
Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese present unique issues.
Both use
ideograms--a character that represents a concept like "sky", "happy",
"person", etc.
In Chinese, each character represents a concept, but they are often
combined
to make 2- or 3-character words. For example, the English word
"friendship"
is "友誼" in Chinese (that’s two characters,
“you” and “yi”. “Sexy”
is “性感”-two characters again.
To make it more fun, Chinese is usually written left to right, but
can also
be written right to left or top to bottom. Plus you have two character
sets-traditional (used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many overseas
communities),
and simplified (used on the Mainland, in Singapore, and, more and
more,
overseas).
Japanese is even more fun, because they use 4 character sets-Kanji
(Chinese
characters), Hirigana and Katakana (syllable-based phonetic
characters), and
Romaji, or Western (Latin) characters.
With both Japanese and Chinese, you will have, at a minimum, over
2,000
characters to deal with. The Japanese and Chinese have developed
software-based IME’s (Input Method Editors) because, of
course, a
2,000-character keyboard would be impractical. The bottom line is
that the
Chinese/Japanese/Korean use will only be able to do input on machines
enabled for their language. A Korean business person using the
business
center at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco probably
won’t be able to
type in Korean.
Those are some of the issues you will face. It may sound daunting-
and in
fact it is-but it’s been done before (except for bi-di).
Cordially,
Kerry Thompson
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