Re: Help with Arabic computers

Hi Marc,

I'm not surprised that happens if you type a western European language
in RTL mode. Poor pango would be awfully confused...

I've tried copy and pasting Arabic text from Arabic websites into the
middle of Arabic text (also from Arabic websites) and it looks OK to
my very, very untrained eye.

Could somebody who understands a RTL language try changing the
"normal" style to use the font Dejavu-sans and setting the alignment
to to right aligned?

You can change it via the format->styles dialog.

Cheers

Martin

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:10 PM, J.M. Maurer <uwog@uwog.net> wrote:
> Did you actually try it? If I do, and try to insert text, it goes all
> over the place (especially when inserting spaces)
>
> Marc
>
> On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 17:09 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>> Hi Marc,
>> Actually I think the bug is in the template files for
>> arabic and other RTL languages. We explicitly set the text aligned to
>> be left-aligned. The formatter needs to honour this request even for
>> RTL languages because one can easily think of use cases where a RTL
>> user wants to put text on the left side the document, like English
>> speakers have the need for right-aligned text.
>>
>> Here is the template for normal.awt-ar (Arabic locale)
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> <styles>
>> <s type="P" name="Normal" basedon="" followedby="Current Settings"
>> props="font-family:Times New Roman; margin-top:0pt;
>> font-variant:normal; margin-left:0pt; text-indent:0in; widows:2;
>> font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none;
>> color:000000; line-height:1.0; text-align:left; margin-bottom:0pt;
>> text-position:normal; margin-right:0pt; bgcolor:transparent;
>> font-size:12pt; font-stretch:normal"/>
>> </styles>
>> <pagesize pagetype="A4" orientation="portrait" width="210.000000"
>> height="297.000000" units="mm" page-scale="1.000000"/>
>> <section props="page-margin-right:1.0000in;
>> page-margin-footer:0.5000in; page-margin-header:0.5000in;
>> page-margin-left:1.0000in; page-margin-top:1.0000in;
>> page-margin-bottom:1.0000in">
>> <p style="Normal"></p>
>> </section>
>> </abiword>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>> See "text-align:left;" ? We explicitly ask for left-alignment even
>> though we set the dominant direction to RTL.
>>
>> The solution is straight forward change the templates to set the
>> property: "text-align:right;" for normal style. Since almost all our
>> styles are basedon normal, the styles will inherit right-alignment as
>> default.
>>
>> Tomas, do you have an opinion?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:18 PM, J.M. Maurer <uwog@uwog.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 10:43 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>> >>
>> >> You also need to set the paragraph property of the template to be
>> >> right aligned. That will put the caret on the right side the screen.
>> >
>> > Try it yourself using "LANG=ar_AE.utf8 abiword". Either I don't
>> > understand how RtL languages work, or we broke its behavior (I bet on
>> > the latter).
>> >
>> > Arabic speaking people, could you test the following for me:
>> >
>> > 1) start abiword on a "normal PC" using LANG=ar_AE.utf8 abiword
>> > 2) right align the paragraph (Format -> Align -> Right)
>> > 3) type some words, and see if it behaves normally (cursor movement,
>> > letter placement, inserting a space)?
>> >
>> > @Martin: we never needed to manually right align afaict. Sure, I can
>> > make it part of the Normal style for arabic, but that means it breaks
>> > all down again as soon as you use anything other than Normal (ie. one of
>> > the built-in styles). I'm fairly sure we broke this. It should
>> > auto-right align imo, and I think we used to do that.
>> >
>> > Cheers!
>> > Marc
>> >
>> >
>
>
Received on Wed Dec 17 12:29:17 2008