Re: Jalaali?!

[Omid K. Rad]

http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/T_System_Globalization_JalaaliCalendar.asp

 

At MSDN Whidbeyâs class library you read:

 

"The JalaaliCalendar class represents the
Jalaali calendar. The Jalaali calendar is also known as the Persian calendar,
or the solar Hijri calendar as opposed to the Arabic lunar Hijri calendar. 

The Jalaali calendar is used in most
countries where Farsi is spoken, although some regions use different month
names. The Jalaali calendar is the official calendar of Iran and Afghanistan,
and is one of the alternative calendars in regions such as Kurdish Mesopotamia,
Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan.

Dates in the Jalaali calendar start
from the year of the Hijra, which corresponds to 622 C.E. and is the year when
Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina. For example, the date March 21, 2002
C.E. corresponds to the first day of the month of Farvardeen in the year 1381
A.H.

The Jalaali calendar is based on a
solar year and is approximately 365 days long. A year cycles through four
seasons, and a new year begins when the sun appears to cross the equator from
the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere as viewed from the center of
the Earth. The new year marks the first day of the month of Farvardeen, which
in the northern hemisphere is the first day of spring.

Each of the first six months in the
Jalaali calendar has 31 days, each of the next five months has 30 days, and the
last month has 29 days in a common year and 30 days in a leap year. A leap year
is a year that, when divided by 33, has a remainder of 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 22, 26,
or 30. For example, the year 1370 is a leap year because dividing it by 33
yields a remainder of 17. There are approximately 8 leap years in every 33 year
cycle."

 

Even though it gives a rather good briefing of the
calendar, however some parts really need to be changed. Besides the name of the
calendar that is still under debate, it seems to me that we have to start over
discussing about the name of the language as well. Where do they speak Farsi?!
I speak Persian. Another fault there is the era indication of "A.H".
A.H. refers to Anno Hijae which marks a Hijri date. For Jalali (if named so) it
would be A.P. which stands for Anno Persico or Anno Pesarum.

 

If you see any other points that need mentioning, please
let me know. I am listing these points to make a feedback to MS. In the
meantime you can make your own comments to MS through the email address at the
bottom of the page linked above.

 

Thanks,

Omid K. Rad






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RE: A new Persian Unicode keyboard

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Saied Nesbat wrote:

> Thanks Behdad!

You're welcome.

> I have gone through your slide presentation online and I am trying to sort
> out things now!

Good.

> So you mean each para should be wrapped in RTL PDF pair? I have experimented
> with outputting RTL, but in some apps (mainly Word) it does not seem to have
> any effect. Is there a setting in word that can remedy this?

No, paragraphs should not be wrapped in anything.  Some systems
automatically detect paragraph direction based on its content
(basically the first alphabetic letter), but apparently Microsoft
systems don't.  So you've got to push a button in Word for that.
I'm sure you can find answers to all your problems here:

http://students.washington.edu/irina/persianword/persianwp.htm

> Do you know of any tool that correctly implements the protocol, so that I
> can use it for testing?

The gedit text editor from the GNOME project is a good example.
Basically anything using latest GNOME libraries implements this.

> Best regards,
>
> Saied
>
> P.s., My friend Farhad Msoudi who just visited Toronto tells me that the a
> huge portion of the CS dept of Toronto university is Iranian.
> Congratulations guys!

Thanks.

behdad




> -Original Message-
> From: Behdad Esfahbod [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 1:43 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: Persian Computing List
> Subject: RE: A new Persian Unicode keyboard
>
>
> Well, [softening my throat] like Ehsan already mentioned, then
> only trick is to use RTL paragraphs, and not only right-align the
> paragraph.  That solves most of the problem.  For the remaining
> few cases, these things called LRM and RLM should be used.
>
> behdad
>
>
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
>
> > The problem, as some of you might have guessed, is the direction
> switching.
> > Given an application like MS Word, my keyboard correctly sends the
> > characters, and Word gives them the right form. But sometimes some
> > characters (mainly the "shared" chars), and often the blinking caret
> appear
> > on the wrong side of the line.
> >
> > What can be done to make the shared characters (Like "!") to appear on the
> > correct side? The caret problem can be fixed with Word's RTL command. But
> > mixing English and Persian letters in the same line often leads to
> > unpredictable outcomes.
> > The rule of the thumb is, use RTL paragraphs when writing Persian text
> > (which might contain English text within it) and use LTR when writing
> > English text (which might contain Persian text within it.)
> >
> > Is there an algorithm governing these situations that I can use to modify
> > the output to remedy this?
> > There is an algorithm called Unicode BiDirectional Algorithm, the details
> of
> > which is avaibale on Unicode.org.  As you might have guessed, Word doesn't
> > provide a correct implementation of this algorithm (nor do any other text
> > editors that I know of to this date.)  There's a library being developed
> > called FriBidi, of which Behdad is the project maintainer, IIRC, which
> might
> > help you, but not with Word probably.  I guess Behdad would be able to
> make
> > profound comments on this.
> > -
> > Ehsan Akhgari
> > www.farda-tech.com 
> > List Owner:  
> > MSVC@BeginThread.com
> > [Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > [WWW: http://www.beginthread.com/Ehsan ]
> >
>
> --behdad
> http://behdad.org/
>
>
>

--behdad
http://behdad.org/
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