Xref: utzoo news.software.b:6444 soc.culture.lebanon:72
Newsgroups: news.software.b,soc.culture.lebanon
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!nmouawad
From: nmouawad@watmath.waterloo.edu (Naji Mouawad)
Subject: Re: New USENET header: Language
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 90 23:11:46 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Dec22.231146.17316@watmath.waterloo.edu>
References: <1990Dec22.081718.2109@looking.on.ca> <4ec122f7.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Lines: 60

In article <4ec122f7.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu> rees@citi.umich.edu
(Jim Rees) writes:

   We need a way to feed non-latin scripts through the net.  Way
   back in 1983 I posted some patches to make B news 8-bit safe.
   Almost all new news transport is now done either by nntp or uucp,
   both of which are 8-bit safe, so it's just a matter of making
   sure your relay program doesn't strip bits.  Are modern B-news
   and C-news 8-bit safe?

In fact, for Arabic you 7-bit suffices since, Arabic has 28 letters,
each of which can be written in at most 3 different ways, makes a
total of 84 combinations, way below the 128 characters in the 7-bit
representation.


  The other half of this is fixing the reading and posting
  programs.  For example, xrn could be fixed so that if it sees
  "Language: Japanese" in the header, it switches to a text widget
  that can display Japanese text.  This would require agreement on
  which of the Japanese text encoding schemes to use (EUC, JIS,
  etc.) but this shouldn't be hard if we discuss it here and just
  pick one.  There are already text widgets to display Japanese so
  hooking one up to xrn shouldn't be hard.


This seems to be a good starting point. I've heard that GnuEmacs can
be tweaked to support right to left editing. If this is the case and
assuming there is a way to swap fonts on an ascii terminal (such as 
a Vt100, wyse or whatever) to replace the Latin alphabet with the Arabic
alphabet, then we should be all set.

We cannot at present times requiere an Xwindows terminal to read
news.  As a rule, any terminal that give access to the news in
English, should just as easily give access to the news in a
different language.


    Right now there is a debate going on in soc.culture.lebanon on
    the best way to write Arabic using a latin script.  That misses
    the boat, as I see it.  What we should be doing is sending and
    displaying actual Arabic characters, not some romanised
    bastardisation.  

That'll be really nice ! I am more than willing to stop looking for
a standard way of writting Arabic in Latin alphabet if we can write
using the Arabic alphabet.

Any suggestions are welcome.

   I'll shut up now since I'm not volunteering to do any real work.

Thanks for your comments.

--Naji.
-- 
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    | Naji Mouawad  |          nmouawad@watmath.waterloo.edu            |
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