[jsword-devel] Alkitab Bible Study 0.9 released

[DM Smith]

On Jun 5, 2008, at 1:45 AM, Tonny Kohar wrote:

> Yup font is still a minor (for me) annoyances especially when deal
> with RTL text. Since I am not speaking in RTL languages, I am blind in
> this area. So any feedback in this area is really appreciated.

I am blind wrt RTL also. But I was able, with some help, to get BD to  
have RTL support.

A couple of pointers based upon BD which uses HTML to do rendering:

In HTML, the dir="rtl" is essential, align="right" is helpful,  
xml.lang="fa" doesn't do anything.

With mixed rtl and ltr text a bidi (bidirectional) algorithm will be  
used. It is a heuristic that uses unicode tables to determine the  
directionality of each character. The first character sets the  
dominant direction of the text. Using ltr numbers (0-9) at the  
beginning of verses may set the wrong dominance. There are some bidi  
directional unicode values that can be inserted into the text to force  
proper directionality of the text. (I haven't figured these out yet).

The ability to set font for a language or module is very important as  
many fonts do not have good RTL coverage.

Basically, this is sufficient to get a credible RTL implementation  
going.

To really get Java to shine with RTL, you will need to ditch Swing.  
(BD still uses Swing.) Swing has poor bidi algorithm and rtl  
rendering. It's handling of joiners in fonts is poor also.

Our plan for BD is to use an embedded browser. Ideally it would be the  
same on all platforms (e.g. Mozilla's xulRunner or WebKit), but we may  
end up with IE for windows, xulRunner for Linux and WebKit for Mac.

In Him,
	DM