Font Question...

[Shachar Shemesh]

Duane Clark wrote:

> motub at planet.nl wrote:
>
>> Duane Clark wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Please respond in the newsgroup, rather than to me directly. That
>>> way there is a chance that someone with experience with Hebrew
>>> fonts (like Shachar) might be able to jump in with some intelligent
>>> comments. Which, unfortunately, I don't have any to add here ;) I
>>> don't know enough about fonts.
>>
>>
>> I can't say that I do either, but it seems to me that the problem is
>> not necessarily the fonts themselves, but is more likely to lie in
>> the fact that Hebrew is written right-to-left, and not left-to-right
>> like English and other such languages.
>>
>> Wouldn't Wine have to have special support built in to recognize and 
>> properly display such languages? 
>
>
> Yes, Wine does have support for right-to-left langauages, though I 
> don't know how thorough that support is. I believe that Shachar has 
> done quite a bit of Wine work in this area, and uses Wine with Hebrew 
> fonts regularly.

It has pretty basic support. Word processors, however, tend not to rely 
on the underlying Windows support for BiDi. It appears Windows' BiDi 
support has been so erratic that noone dared rely on it. This includes 
Microsoft Word.

Dagesh is an even more extreme case. It has been marketed, when it 
originally came out, as "the word processor that doesn't require a 
Hebrew enabled OS to work". Not relying on OS's support for Hebrew was 
literally a selling point for this product.

Like I said in a different thread, I believe the problem may have to do 
with keyboard detection rather than with fonts.

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