Hi,

I talked with Itzhak Mintz yesterday. He told me several things:

1. The only windows specific bit in Qtext is that certain classes
   inherit from a class for a generic window (something called hwindow).
   Everything else (including buttons, menus, fonts ...) is their own. I
   guess this should make the porting effort minimal.

2. He would like to be in contact with someone who is willing to take
   responsibility for the porting project. If there is someone who is
   willing to do this, please email me.

3. The algorithms are not patented. Furthermore, he claims that the same
   ideas that they use in QText can be applied in general to solve most
   of the bidi problems (in essence, the idea is that the standards
   should be changed so that all non-word characters will have a r2l 
   version, so there will be a r2l '-', a r2l ' ' and so on). He said
   that if someone is interested in addopting it for the system level
   (whatever it means... I gather that bidi support is dealt with in
   QT, but I have no idea what happens with applications that are not QT
   based), he is willing to help. If someone is interested in this,
   please email me.

He also showed me their last version for windows, and it *is* much
better than whatever I saw so far (actually, it seems better than M$
word even without the bidi issues).

Moshe

PS: I'm going to miluim this Monday for a month, so if you want to
contact him through me, send me an email before that.

  Moshe Kaminsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [24/09/02 11:27]:
> Hi,
> When I was a kid, I used a word processor called Qtext on my dos
> machine. It was a freeware written by an Israeli guy, and had a better
> (by far) bidi support than any alternative I knew.
> 
> Yesterday, I discovered that I work with the guy who wrote it in the
> same room. He told me that Qtext still exists, it is no longer a
> freeware (it belongs to his kibutz) and that it still has the best bidi
> support (they have only a window$ version). He also told me that the
> developement of Qtext has stopped, since people seem to prefer M$ word
> (apparently for the same obscure reasons they prefer other M$ 
> software :). Anyway, he told me that they might be willing to sell the
> source. Since they ceased developing it, I guess the price won't be very
> high, and if it is possible to port it to linux, this might be the best
> bidi word processor we have (it also supports Arabic and nikud).
> 
> My question is, is there someone who might want to fund it?
> 
> Moshe
> 
> --
> Moshe Kaminsky 
> (Home) 08-9471073
> 
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--
Moshe Kaminsky 
(Home) 08-9471073

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