Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[Bill Nottingham]

We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
that's not the preferred way.

Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US that
we do for CJK locales?

Bill

[Tom Callaway]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 14:03 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
>  console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
>  that's not the preferred way.
>  
>  Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US that
>  we do for CJK locales? 
Not being a Arabic or Hebrew reader, what are the tradeoffs between the
two approaches?

~spot

[Miloš Komarčević]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
>  console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
>  that's not the preferred way.
>
>  Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US that
>  we do for CJK locales? 
I have noticed some problems with Cyrillic (Serbian) as well (and same
with non-ASCII characters in Serbian Latin) - this is still LTR, but
comes out garbled.

Same issue, or a separate one I need to report in BZ?

Miloš

[Bill Nottingham]

Miloš Komarčević (kmilos(a)gmail.com) said: 
>  On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Bill Nottingham
> <notting(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  > We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
>  > console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
>  > that's not the preferred way.
>  >
>  > Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US that
>  > we do for CJK locales?
>  
>  I have noticed some problems with Cyrillic (Serbian) as well (and same
>  with non-ASCII characters in Serbian Latin) - this is still LTR, but
>  comes out garbled.
>  
>  Same issue, or a separate one I need to report in BZ? 
No, that would be a separate issue. Although it's probably related to
bug 458362.

Bill

[Oron Peled]

On Thursday, 9 בOctober 2008, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
>  console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
>  that's not the preferred way. 
Yeh, if we only had a chance to embed libfribidi into kernel mode ;-)

>  Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US
> that
>  we do for CJK locales? 
What are you doing for CJK locales? Ignoring the translation and
show the original en_US? Globally for all apps? [a hack in gettext
implementation?]

I would tend to leave at least Hebrew as it is:
 * While Hebrew in LTR is not good, it *is* legible (with
   some effort). I think Arabic isn't (due to "rabt" [connected
   letters]) but regretfully, I forgot most of the Arab I learned
   in highschool, so don't take my word about it.

 * Also, many times someone is running the program remotely from
   a terminal emulator that has Unicode-Bidi implementation
   (e.g: mlterm) and in this case they'll see the text fine.
   How do you recognize that this is a virtual console and not
   another text-mode terminal emulator?


-- 
Oron Peled                             Voice/Fax: [phone]
oron(a)actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose
 sight of the shore..."

[Bill Nottingham]

Oron Peled (oron(a)actcom.co.il) said: 
>  > Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to
> en_US that
>  > we do for CJK locales?
>  
>  What are you doing for CJK locales? 
If you're on the console and LANG is set to zh_CN/ja_JP/etc, it
gets reset to en_US. See /etc/profile.d/lang.{csh,sh}

>   * Also, many times someone is running the program remotely from
>     a terminal emulator that has Unicode-Bidi implementation
>     (e.g: mlterm) and in this case they'll see the text fine.
>     How do you recognize that this is a virtual console and not
>     another text-mode terminal emulator? 
This wouldn't be affected, as that is a pty (i.e., /dev/pts/X);
this only affects it if you're on /dev/tty[1-6].

Bill

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
>  console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
>  that's not the preferred way. 
Yeah, it's pretty unusable.  For ebrew it's just mirrored.  For Arabic it also
lacks shaping.  I have solutions for them if we really want to fix them, but
the solution needs:

  1) Switch to a new font for Arabic as a full Arabic font needs over a
hundred glyphs.  I have a good font for it, in the BiCon package mentioned below,

  2) Needs to run a filter on top of the console.  That can easily be done in
rc.  The code for it is mostly available already, in a package called BiCon.
Search for "BiCon Arabeyes".  Though I need to rewrite some parts of it to use
the new features in fribidi2.  In the end, it's fribidi (already in fedora)
plus a small 500-line script-like utility to pass everything through.

If there is enough interest, I can look into this.

>  Should we leave it this way, or do the same substitution to en_US
> that
>  we do for CJK locales? 
In the short term (F10...), this makes perfect sense.

behdad

>  Bill
>