[opensource-dev] Problem with displaying Arabic menu text in SL client

Joshua Bell josh at lindenlab.com
Tue Oct 5 09:30:58 PDT 2010


On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 4:32 AM, izze euler <izzee at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

>  Are you able to give an example on how to use this character within an XML
> file?
>

Using that character won't have any effect. As Boroondas mentioned, Second
Life's text engine is pretty basic and simply doesn't support:

   - Right-to-Left scripts - typically this functionality is called "BiDi"
   since the  direction actually changes within text strings for numbers,
   foreign words, etc.
   - Contextual shaping (think: ligatures as a mandatory language feature)
   - Combining characters/diacritics* (think: characters merge into single
   glyphs)
   - Complex word breaking (for languages that don't use spaces)

This is a big task, and (as Boroondas also mentioned) is probably best
tackled by a thorough overhaul/replacement of SL's text rendering engine as
Alissa Sabre attempted.

Additionally, if we're talking about a localized version of the UI and not
just rendering text content correctly, you'd also want to flip the X
coordinates for some (but not all) UI layout if the app was running with a
UI language that was RTL, which would require changes to the XUI engine and
some of the controls. (Since, ideally you don't have to touch all of the
control rects in all of the XUI files)

-- Josh

* I look forward to the day when someone writes a text engine that handles
the character combining logic for classical Mayan.
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