--- Nori Heikkinen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm running Debian, and I'm trying to set up my terminals to deal with > Arabic UTF-8 data. Sifting through hundreds of howtos and such about > unicode in general, it seems that I _should_ be able to set my locales > to ar_EG.UTF-8 (picked Egypt semi at random), open an xterm with the > -u8 flag, and then view files (say, in cat, or vim, which I understand > has good UTF-8 support[1]). But I still get all kinds of non-Arabic > characters.
What you note above should "kinda" work (the reason I used kinda is you will not see any shaping - ie. the Arabic characters will not be joined nor will you get bidi, unless you intercept and pipe, etc). Make sure you run xterm-180+ (or better) and specify a font that has both 8859-6 as well as form-B glyphs (you can find fonts on Arabeyes' "khotot" project). Here's something that I use often, http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/arabeyes/ae_fonts_mono.tar.bz2 (xterm -u8 -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1) And a sample file to look at would be, http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/ar_utf8 > While I can't see utf8 Arabic, I _can_ see utf8 IPA fonts[2] using > `xterm -u8`. I realize that I need to get a bi-directional library > like libfribidi0, as xterm doesn't (and won't[3] support > bi-directional text by itself), and I have ... but that's secondary > right now, as I can't see the script at all. A more working solution is to use mlterm (mlterm.sf.net) along with fribidi (ie. make sure you have it compiled into mlterm) and that should give you Bidi/Shaping on a terminal emulator that is fully working. http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/howto/arabic-howto-en/xwindows.html#XTERMINALS > I've been reading up on this for days. Do I need a Unicode terminal > font that supports Arabic, and if so, can someone reccomend one? > Also, could anyone point me to a good Arabic UTF-8 howto, or something > similar? > > [3] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#xterm I've had recent conversations (well from about 2-3 months ago) and xterm's maintainer noted that he is open to the idea of including Bidi and would consider a patch for it. As such we need to clean-up an old patch that is still floating around and resubmit it (shaping is very easy to fix later on). http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/developer/2004/January/msg00095.html Let us know if you are interested in help out include Bidi into xterm. Salam. - Nadim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/ _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
