Self-introduction: Javad Kouhi

Hiroki Sato hrs at FreeBSD.org
Tue Mar 31 03:45:54 UTC 2020


Javad Kouhi <javad.kouhi at gmail.com> wrote
  in <CA+g814e5=ipStdmvPFhPaDUprmnaOapcMb1xS9fcFNCA5Y9fQQ at mail.gmail.com>:

ja> As you definitely know, English is written from left to right, but
ja> Persian and other Middle Eastern Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew
ja> are written from right to left. Since the Handbook is a technical book
ja> and it contains a lot of untranslatable words (variable names,
ja> keywords, etc), intermixing Persian and English is inevitable. So, is
ja> there any support for RTL languages? If no, how could I help with
ja> that?

 DocBook XML technically supports RTL.

ja> To make matters worse, there are also XML tags, which could make the
ja> code pretty ugly in RTL languages. Tags are not shown correctly (not
ja> only the user sees something like >/tag< instead of </tag>, but also
ja> they are misplaced in the source code).  I've seen similar problems in
ja> other projects such as Wikipedia. The solution they have adopted is to
ja> translate the tags themselves, this way, the tags are shown correctly
ja> in the source code, making it much easier for others to change the
ja> code. So, is there a way to translate the tags?

 Does "translating tags" mean replacing the tag name of <foo> with
 Parisian counterpart in RTL, or the whole tag including <> in RTL?

 While it is possible to create a preprocessing XSLT to convert them
 back to corresponding DocBook tags, I think it is more realistic to
 keep XML files in LTR as the English versions do, and translate
 sentences in RTL by adding dir="rtl" attribute to the XML tags
 because most of XML toolchains cannot handle tags and attributes in
 RTL.  I am not sure if this is comfortable for RTL language users
 like you, however.

 Could you show a typical HTML file in UTF-8 Persian?  I would like to
 know what tags look like.

-- Hiroki
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