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

[izze euler]

Would it be possible to create images containing the arabic text and displaying those instead of processing through Second Life's text engine?

Izze

Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2010 09:30:58 -0700
From: josh at lindenlab.com
To: opensource-dev at lists.secondlife.com
Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] Problem with displaying Arabic menu text in SL	client


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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