[Mailman-i18n] RTL and BiDi

Martin v. Löwis loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de
08 Oct 2002 13:58:02 +0200


Arash Zeini <a.zeini@farsikde.org> writes:

> No, I didn't try. Usually the web browser doesn't do the RTL
> automatically, if this is what you mean. Wouldn't it need the dir
> attribute?

I've tried both MSIE6 and Mozilla/Gecko, and both render Arabic text
RTL without a dir attribute. They just know, from looking at their
Unicode database, what directionality each character has. 

IMHO, the HTML dir attribute was invented by people who did not think
it possible to implement such a BiDi algorithm in the Web browser.

> I guess the best way to try is to have a test mailman 2.1. Is it
> worth it to try on older versions?

In this area, I recommend to use 2.1bsomething.

> And is there such a testing installation anywhere, or should i set
> one for myself?

I don't know of any test installation for such purposes.

> UTF-8 is the recommended one for Farsi. ISO-8859-6 works best for
> Arabic.

I see. You should add those to Mailman/Defaults.py.

> No. I was not aware of this feature. Is UTF-8 a supported encoding.

Certainly, yes: Mailman supports all encodings supported in Python,
plus a few more. This is all for Mailman 2.1, of course.

> What would be the recommended way?

I'd recommend to add Farsi as a language to mailman, and take no
additional steps for RTL. I still think it would work out just fine.

Regards,
Martin