Re: [Groff] Arabic support ?

[Khaled Hosny]

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 08:11 +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > I'm a member of an Arabic team ( arabeyes.org) working in localizing
> > Linux (and other *nx like systems).
> > 
> > Recently, we are working in translating manpages and I'm the
> > coordinator of that project, but unfortunately I found that groff
> > doesn't support Arabic at all (using 1.19.1 version) and all what I
> > got is some meaningless characters, I did some googling and
> > searching in this mailing list and what I found is that no way to
> > use Arabic with groff now - I hop that I'm wrong -.
> 
> I'm very sorry to say that you are right.  groff doesn't support
> right-to-left scripts, and it won't do that in the future except you
> find a good guy who wants to implement that.  Additionally, it has
> absolutely no support for a shaping engine necessary for real Arabic
> processing.
> 
> It really hurts me to say that but I think that the cleanest way
> currently is to use an external man2xxx (for example, man2html)
> translator.
> 
> 
>     Werner
This is too late reply, but I found that all what we need to get man
pages in Arabic is to have proper Unicode support in groff as, in the
case of man pages, the RTL and shapping should be handeled by the
terminal not by groff itself (I found that after using Bruno Haible's
utf-8 hack)