[etoys-dev] Etoys in Arab, is it possible ?

[Timothy Falconer]

Mike,

How many are using Etoys in Pashto and Dari, would you say?

Tim

On Oct 24, 2009, at 11:22 PM, Mike Dawson wrote:

> Hi Guys,
>
> Well.... this doesn't make it impossible to use it actually.  Actually
> quite a lot of things don't have quite the 100% proper RTL interface -
> so many things you would expect to actually don't (e.g. content
> management systems).
>
> The good thing is that the text itself is there (the order of the
> letters comes correctly) ....
>
> I would rather say going and putting it into the language is the first
> step... then one might attract the developers to go making further
> modifications once they see that (step by step)...  EToys is deployed
> out here in Dari and Pashto, and is usable.
>
> Also mirroring things wouldn't always help... numbers in Arabic script
> are actually left to right and the text interior is taken care of.
> Also although not much in the etoys interface but you generally get
> some latin written in brackets so it should be rtl ltr rtl again...
>
> Regards,
>
> -Mike (in Afghanistan)
>
> 2009/10/22 Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org>:
>> At Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:58:01 +0200,
>> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 22.10.2009, at 07:52, Andreas Raab wrote:
>>>
>>>> Korakurider wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Andreas Raab  
>>>>> <andreas.raab at gmx.de>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Korakurider wrote:
>>>>>>>  Oh, I see. Thanks.
>>>>>>>  I also found screenshot of Arabic WinXP, that is interesting.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> http://blog.way2.jp/system/wordpress/wp-content/2009/02/arabic-windows.jpg
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So rewriting of all of UI pieces would be needed...
>>>>>> Mirror it. OLPCVirtualScreen can deal with it just fine using
>>>>>> WarpBlt for
>>>>>> the RTL layout. No changes required; everything would stick to  
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> right
>>>>>> edge; x would go left in viewers etc. It'd be a pretty simple
>>>>>> thing to do.
>>>>>> The hardest part would probably be getting the text rendering to
>>>>>> actually
>>>>>> produce LTR rendering for RTL text since you're going to do the
>>>>>> mirroring on
>>>>>> your own.
>>>>>    But it means (x,y) coordinate system  will be also horizontally
>>>>> mirrored.  Is that valid thing?
>>>>
>>>> Mathematically, or culturally? Mathematically, yes (it's just a 180
>>>> deg rotation around the y axis), culturally I don't know (but I
>>>> would generally expect that increasing horizontal values are mapped
>>>> in the way of the primary reading direction).
>>>
>>> Etoys uses the mathematical convention, origin is in lower left. I
>>> thought about the mirroring option before but thought it would be
>>> unacceptable - all downloaded projects would be mirrored too, and
>>> would have the coordinate origin in the lower right.
>>
>>  I thought mirroring the whole screen is a joke.  It is not like
>> these countries are dominated by left-handers.  Positive x goes  
>> toward
>> right.
>>
>>> Also, we will always have a mix of LTR with RTL text so we'd have to
>>> double-mirror the LTR spans (see the Latin text in Arab screen shot
>>> above).
>>
>>  Yes, Pango and typical rendering engines handle it.
>>
>>> OTOH even if imperfect it would still be better than not supporting
>>> RTL locales at all. We'd need someone familiar with this to comment.
>>
>>  Right, possibly only scriptors (and possibly viewers) can do it
>> (namely, scriptors interior is RTL and viewer clings from left... the
>> latter may or may not be important) that would be some improvement.
>>
>> -- Yoshiki
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--
Timothy Falconer
Squeakland Foundation
http://squeakland.org
610-797-3100
--
"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."  ...  
piaget