Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[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: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose
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