Font Question...

[Shachar Shemesh]

Duane Clark wrote:

> ckotting at wideopenwest.com wrote:
>
>> Bummer.  That was not the answer I was hoping for.  I have one key 
>> application (Dagesh 2000, a multilingual word processor) that works 
>> under wine, as long as you're typing in English.  Switch to any other 
>> character set (like Cyrillic Greek or Hebrew) and the program is 
>> fine, but nothing that you type appears, or will print.
>>
>> If I can get Dagesh working for my wife, we'll have a Windows-free 
>> household.
>>
>> Anybody have any ideas?
>
>
>
> Hmm, does the program come with fonts? Did you install them into 
> Wine's window/Fonts directory? Do they show up in the font selection 
> dialog?
>
Hi,

I figured that my name was, more or less, dragged into the conversation, 
so I might as well respond.

I have never had the privelege of running Dagesh. I would actually love 
to have a look at this application for reasons that have nothing to do 
with Wine (we are thinking of shamelessly copying some of the BiDi 
algorithms from it into OpenOffice). I think I can speculate as to what 
may be the cause of the problem.

First, I'll mention that my own experience is that Wine will do a fairly 
poor job of rendering non Latin fonts when it is not using the builtin 
TrueType renderer. This does not seem to be the problem in your case, 
however. Just to make sure, try loading Notepad and typing some 
non-English characters. If these work, that is not your problem.

The thing that is most likely causing Dagesh to not work is the keyboard 
langauge detection code. The simplest way of verifying this is by trying 
to load an existing document that has Hebrew or Russian in it. If my 
theory is right, existing documents should render without problems.

If that is the case, there is not much solace I can offer you. I have 
estimated the needed effort to fix this problem at 1 week of work (it's 
also byting Office users, but only Hebrew and Arabic there). I'm 
currently looking for a sponsor for this, as I can't seem to find the 
time to do this otherwise.

Lastly, if you can get me a copy of Dagesh, I would love to have a look 
at it myself.

                Shachar
P.S.
There were some talks about buying the rights to Dagesh and open 
sourcing it. As far as I know, nothing got out of that.

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Systems Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/