Re: Arabic. (Tomas can you answer?)

From: Alessandro Baretta (alex@baretta.com)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 09:46:00 EDT

  • Next message: F J Franklin: "Re: An ongoing argument (was: ligal.so.7)"

    Andrew Dunbar wrote:
    >
    > Are you sure you are using a bidi-enabled build of
    > AbiWord? AbiWord has been buildable with and without
    > the bidi support which AbiWord needs for Arabic to
    > work properly. Check where you got it from to see if
    > they have both versions and look for "bidi".
    >
    > In the future Arabic will work with all builds so this
    > problem will go away.
    >
    > Andrew Dunbar.
    >

    Yes, as I already stated in a former post, which you might
    not have received, I am using two different bidi builds of
    Abiword: 1.0.0 for Linux and 1.0.1 for Windows.

    I have performed a more attentive test and I noticed that
    both versions seem to malfunction in an identical fashion. I
    originally thought there might be a bug in one of libraries
    that Abiword relies on and that were already present in my
    Mandrake distro before installing Abiword. This is probably
    not the case since the following malfunctioning also occurs
    with the Windows version.

    In the following lines I show what happens when I type "The
    quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." while using the
    right-to-left feature of the Format->Paragraph menu item.
    Use a vertical bar (pipe) to indicate the position of the
    cursor.

    > |ehT
    > The q|kciu
    > The quick b|nwor
    > The quick brown f|xo
    > The quick brown fox j|spmu
    > The quick brown fox jumps o|rev
    > The quick brown fox jumps over t|eh
    > The quick brown fox jumps over the l|yza
    > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d|.go
    > The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.\n

    As you can see words initially appear reversed to a
    right-to-left character ordering, but after each space the
    words are reversed back to their normal left-to-right
    appearance. It is also interesting to notice how all words
    after the first one do not appear correctly reversed because
    the first letter remains to the left of the cursor, while
    the following letters appear to the right. If the developers
    deem it useful, I could produce a sequence of screenshots to
    show the exact appearance on screen of the characters as I
    type them.

    It would be very interesting for me to receive news about
    other users' experience with the right-to-left feature. It
    seems to me very strange that the Abiword team would not
    notice such a gross bug. For this reason I have not yet
    filed a bug report: I would like to ascertain the nature of
    the malfunctioning first.

    Thank you very much for your time and interest.

    Alex Baretta

    -----------------------------------------------
    To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
    abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
    unsubscribe in the message body.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 11 2002 - 07:44:58 EDT