Right-to-left Languages in FreeBSD docs

[Chuck Swiger]

Kambiz Agahian wrote:
> We are looking for right-to-left in order to add support of Persian language
>  to FreeBSD docs. normally we use UTF-8 and I wonder if anyone help our team
> to start job with right-to-left Persian fonts.

Welcome to "Alphabet soup", which is aptly named.
I think Persian and Farsi are covered by ISO 8859-6 here:

http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html#ISO-8859-6

There seems to be a downloadable BDF font image, and this commentary:

"This is the Arabic alphabet, unfortunately the basic alphabet for the Arabic 
(ar) language only and not containing the four extra letters for Persian (fa) 
nor the eight extra letters for Pakistani Urdu (ur). This fixed font is not 
well-suited for text display. Each Arabic letter occurs in up to four (2²) 
presentation forms: initial, medial, final or separate. To make Arabic text 
legible you'll need a display engine that analyses the context and combines the 
appropriate glyphs on top of a handler for the reverse writing direction shared 
with Hebrew. The rendering algorithm is described in the Unicode book and I 
have implemented it in my arabjoin perl script."

You might also try hunting down some Linux distribution which has Persian 
documentation or support, and ask them about what they're doing in terms of 
fonts and compositing.

One you get something, your stuff would go under a "ar_AR.ISO8859-6" 
subdirectory of the docs tree (ie, /usr/share/docs), or "fa" 
something-or-other...?  :-)

-- 
-Chuck