Arabic and Drupal

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Will Drupal take character sets other than western? I can see a "charset=iso-8859-6 - Arabic Alphabet (ISO)", but have no idea how to try it. The project I am working on would have very limited Arabic in it, but not being fluent in HTML or anything else, just don't know if it is worth the effort?

The Character would start out speaking UAE Arabic but when he realized that the other participants in the scene spoke only english switched to english. I think it would add a bit of eye candy and realism to the scene.

It will be some time before I get to that part.

Gwen

Comments

Character sets

erin's picture

Yes, Drupal can be set up to use other character sets and even right to left processing instead of left to right. But that would mean that all users of that site would need to have the required fonts on their machines in order to see the same thing.

That probably is not going to happen with BC. If you want to use some Arabic lettering in a story, the best thing to do is likely to use a .gif or .png of the text.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Will probably just do it simple

Thanks. I will probably run what I want to say through Google translate, cut and paste it or make a gif file. The only one likely to see through all that would be a person fluent in Arabic.

I also wish there were a designation other than Forced Fem in the TG genre. Being TG is not something I would have chosen and at first it was forced, but in the final analysis, it has worked out. Many of my stories follow that line.

Gwen,

Gwen,
I'd try to steer clear of any of the ISO-8859-x character sets. If you want to mix languages then UTF is the way to go. UTF-8 is a single byte character set bit importantly it can actually handle Arabic, urdu, thai, Chinese, korean etc. This is done by using a special set of characters (line an escape sequence) to switch the stream into UTF-16 or even UTF-32.

The only disadvantage is finding a decent text editor that can handle it. I use UTF-8 everyday in my work but 99% of the data is in English even for Arabic speaking countries.
The right to left arrangement is also a problem for a lot of editors. The other problem I've found is that some editors don't join the characters properly. This is a problem because as you well know, not connecting a character can radically change the meaning of the text.

If you do find a decent english/arabic editor please let me know.

A bit of history here.
The precursor to the ISO-8859 series of character sets was something known as the DEC Multinational Character Set. DEC as in Digital Equipment Company. I worked at the next desk to the person working on the microcode for the Arabic VT220 Characters circa 1981/82.

Samantha

Erk. Flashback to working on

Erk. Flashback to working on a VAX running VMS through VT102 and 220 terminals.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Flashback?

Sorry, don't speak that dialect of what is it?

Gwen

a VAX is a mini-mainframe

a VAX is a mini-mainframe system, or rather, was, made by DEC in the late 70's through the 90's. When Compaq bought DEC, they EOLed the VAX system. VAX/VMS is the core 'language' that you used to communicate with the system. VT102 emulation was used by most terminal systems to talk to DEC mainframes (and others), through the VT220 and later series of terminals. The highest end terminals I saw were the full colour terminals, very popular with the folks using early IRC. (Yes, the people using IRC and MUDs are responsible for what is now referred to as 'leet' speak. Mostly it was shorthand used by people who didn't know how to type, and were on slow dial-ups)


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Never used a VAX

But I went to school using a UNIBLAB 1100 system with punch card programming and everything. Debugging was a dog of course.

Vax VMS

Piper's picture

I used to have a VAX Micro Mainframe in my livingroom. Bob Arnold was quite jealous of that. Unfortunately I had to leave it behind in one of my more recent moves.

-Piper


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Just as well. I was offered

Just as well. I was offered an entire VAX cluster from University of Houston, when they retired it, but I didn't have the space at the time.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Key punch

I was doing some Key Punch work in 1967. The machines were huge and in my mind were not actually computers. They produced a lot of heat and were clunky. By the 80's I was an Electrician and installed lots of power for box van sized Main Frames and their cooling machines.

In the very early 90's we took out all that hardware and put in a tiny stand alone thing the size of a clothes washer that did scads more and produced less heat. We shut off all of the AC except for a 5 ton unit that was too large.

I think my aging Galaxy 4 probably has more computing ability than most desk tops of the 80's.

I was a pro-VAXxer for a while, back in the day

But I think my biggest change from one job to another was from an IBM System-3, Disk Operating System to working on US Military applications on Wang computers.
I suppose you could say I changed from being a DOSser to being a WANGer.

Happy days

J

Can everyone see this?

من هو هذا الطفل؟ هذا ليس ابني.

This might be much more simple than I had thought.

Gwen

Does this help?


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Yes thank you.

Most of the time I overthink a problem. :)

Gwen

Better

than underthinking the problem.