On 11/03/2017 03:40 PM, maxwell wrote:
On 2017-11-03 04:59, Hussein Shafie wrote:
Michael K. wrote:
Aeronautical Information Publications (AIPs) are usually in English,
but some countries publish a bilingual AIP
(English and a local language). One of our customers would like to
publish a bilingual AIP in English and Arabic. Currently, XXE lacks the
support for the necessary right-to-left writing.
That's right.
I assume that the part that lacks support is the conversion to PDF, not
the display of both scripts inside XXE. Because we've been writing
mixed Arabic-script Latin-script texts (grammars) in XXE for a decade
now, with no issues.
You are really a forgiving person.
When I attempt to type (using XXE's Characters tool) an Arabic word
(e.g. my first name حسين) letter by letter, it works but:
1) The caret stays at the same place after typing a letter instead of
moving to the left.
2) Clicking to move the caret between two Arabic letter moves the caret
to vastly incorrect locations (e.g. in the middle of a letter).
I would say that this ridiculous behavior could be changed to something
more decent without spending too much time and efforts on it. May be
we'll do it just for the fun.
Note that just solving the above issues is far, very far, from seriously
supporting right-to-left writing in XXE.
(We do have an issue with the Thaana script, used
in the Dhivehi language, due to a bug in Java. The folks at XXE put in
a bug report on it for us years ago, but apparently that language is not
one of Oracle's priorities... We do have a work-around.)
You can see an example of one of our grammars here, use the "Look
Inside" feature--page 4 has some Arabic script:
https://www.amazon.com/Descriptive-Grammar-Pashto-Dialects-Mouton-Casl/dp/1614513031
Most of our work involves short examples, but we have done
paragraph-level Arabic script output also. I would imagine diglot
output (Arabic and English on facing pages or columns) would also work,
although I have not tried that.
Are there any plans to extend XXE for full Arabic support (incl.
right-to-left writing)?
No, not at all.
If not, is it possible to order the full Arabic support in the scope
of a
change request (and at what costs)?
I'm sorry but but the answer is no...
We have a system for producing PDFs from the XML. This involves the use
of dblatex (a freeware program for converting DocBook XML to LaTeX, see
http://dblatex.sourceforge.net), and then using XeLaTeX (a
Unicode-compatible version of LaTeX, part of the free TeXLive
distribution, https://www.tug.org/texlive) to produce the PDFs.
We don't have the conversion process set up to be callable from XXE,
rather we run it twice daily on a Linux machine. If I had to run it
under Windows, I'd use the new Linux subsystem under Windows 10
(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about). I don't have
experience with Macs, but I assume it would be straightforward to use
such a process there too.
Depending on your resources, you may have the programming expertise to
set this up yourselves. It involves some XSL (at least we had to modify
some of dblatex's templates for our use), LaTeX, and some scripting. If
not, our system could be licensed through the University of Maryland.
It would probably involve some modification for your situation, e.g. to
support diglot output.
Thank you for this feedback and thank you for remembering us that
dblatex could prove to be a very useful tool.
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