Hi,
Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English.
The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context.
Hilaire
On 20.10.2009, at 22:39, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Hi,
Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English.
The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context.
It's not possible at the moment and would unfortunately require a lot of programming.
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ps/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1 http://translate.sugarlabs.org/fa_AF/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1
- Bert -
It was reported to me Scratch can handle Arab. I guess it's true. Is this improvement easily available?
Hilaire
2009/10/21 Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de:
On 20.10.2009, at 22:39, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Hi,
Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English.
The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context.
It's not possible at the moment and would unfortunately require a lot of programming.
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ps/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1 http://translate.sugarlabs.org/fa_AF/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
Scratch has a much simpler UI than Etoys, far fewer elements that need changing. It's not even the text rendering that is so problematic (we could even use Scratch's text rendering plugin, or Pango). The big issue is the layout of the UI, which would need to be adapted for right-to-left locales.
It would be great if someone started to work on this. I don't know with how little adaptation we could get away to make it usable.
- Bert -
On 21.10.2009, at 14:36, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
It was reported to me Scratch can handle Arab. I guess it's true. Is this improvement easily available?
Hilaire
2009/10/21 Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de:
On 20.10.2009, at 22:39, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Hi,
Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English.
The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context.
It's not possible at the moment and would unfortunately require a lot of programming.
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ps/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1 http://translate.sugarlabs.org/fa_AF/etoys/etoys.po? translate=1&view=1
- Bert -
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 20.10.2009, at 22:39, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Hi,
Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English.
The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context.
It's not possible at the moment and would unfortunately require a lot of programming.
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
even with Pango?
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ps/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1 http://translate.sugarlabs.org/fa_AF/etoys/etoys.po?translate=1&view=1
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On Wednesday 21 October 2009 06:25:18 pm Korakurider wrote:
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
even with Pango?
Pango only handles rendering of text. The left-to-right assumptions in laying out items alignment morphs like menu bars, tabs, fields in a form will also be affected. "next" is no longer on the right and "prev" is no longer on the left.
Something like "Name: _______" will become " ________ :emaN" in right-to-left languages.
Subbu
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:19 PM, K. K. Subramaniam subbukk@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday 21 October 2009 06:25:18 pm Korakurider wrote:
The same problem is shared by Pashto and Dari for which we even have translations already but cannot use them :(
even with Pango?
Pango only handles rendering of text. The left-to-right assumptions in laying out items alignment morphs like menu bars, tabs, fields in a form will also be affected. "next" is no longer on the right and "prev" is no longer on the left.
Something like "Name: _______" will become " ________ :emaN" in right-to-left languages.
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...
/Korakurider
Subbu
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.
Cheers, - Andreas
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Andreas Raab andreas.raab@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?
/Korakurider
Cheers, - Andreas
Korakurider wrote:
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Andreas Raab andreas.raab@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 horizontallymirrored. 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).
Cheers, - Andreas
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@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.
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).
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.
Rita, can you ask Svetla from OLPC Afghanistan to get someone involved in this discussion? They did the two translations I mentioned so they should definitely be interested in making it work.
- Bert -
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@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
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@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@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 _______________________________________________ etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
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@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@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 _______________________________________________ etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
-- Timothy Falconer Squeakland Foundation http://squeakland.org 610-797-3100 -- "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." ... piaget
etoys-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Andreas Raab -
Bert Freudenberg -
Hilaire Fernandes -
K. K. Subramaniam -
Korakurider -
Mike Dawson -
Timothy Falconer -
Yoshiki Ohshima