On Monday 07 October 2002 14:42, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
Arash Zeini <a.zeini@farsikde.org> writes:
I am new to this list. As far as I could see from the archives, there is no development toward support for RTL and BiDi for languages like Farsi and Arabic. Is this correct?
What kind of support would you expect? From a mailman point of view, this issue does not exist, AFAICT.
I guess the problem may not exist if I post to a mailing list from within an email client that supports Farsi. OK, there might not be an issue. But the problem may occur as soon as we talk about the archives, where HTML is generated. My guess is everything will be left-to-right and unreadable. This is why I posted. While managing a mailing list I tried to enter some description text in Farsi. Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left and all descriptions that I entered occurred just LTR. Also the generated HTML in mailman does not use UTF-8 encoding why again we have a problem. I.e. no browser would display any of these three languages correctly. One has to set it manually to be able to read the text. Finding a solution shouldn't be too complicated, as all of this is supported through HTML.
Now, translating mailman to Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi languages is another story - contributions are certainly welcome.
You are right, this is another story. But even here we need the proper structure in the HTML pages to be able to translate anything. We need everything mirrored otherwise it is not useable. This is done through the dir="RTL" attribute in HTML. And we need UTF-8 as encoding in the header part of the HTML page. In KDE this problem is solved this way: in the main .pot file there is one string which is not a translatable string but the entry which denotes the text direction. I.e. the translator fills in the value RTL or LTR and according to this value the interface and text direction is set. The same could be done in mailman I guess. Now, if we have the time to work on the translation of Mailman so soon, that is_another_story :) Greetings, Arash -- The FarsiKDE Project http://www.farsikde.org