Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[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
>