print arabic characters

[Martin v. Loewis]

Ahmad wrote:
> I can't beleive
> that after all this time, unicode and bidi support still isn't working
> nicely :(

I'm not surprised at all. To make this really work, you need support
from native speakers of an RTL langauge, ideally both from people
speaking Arabic, and people speaking Hebrew. It appears that there
have been little contributions from Arabic speakers to BiDi aspects
of open source software, so therefore, nothing of this works out of
the box, yet. Other languages' aspects (European diacritic marks, CJK
disambiguation and font selection, Japanese input methods, ...) are
much better supported because speakers of these languages did
contribute in the past.

I would encourage you to contribute to the packages that interest
you most. If I was speaking Arabic (which I don't), I would look
into packages in this order:
- Tk: when this works, Tkinter will work as well
- Konsole: apparently the terminal program that we both use
- xterm: this should be contributed back into the X distribution,
   when done - perhaps you need to first add support for BiDi into
   the underlying X11 libraries
- gnome-terminal

There is probably more (Qt? PythonWin?), but those would have lower
priority for me.

Regards,
Martin