Best way to type arabic in emacs

Best way to type arabic in emacs

[Enrico Schwass]

Hello,

can emacs cvs handle arabic characters? What input method and what
language system works best? So far I can only see single characters.
How can I switch to RTL?

Thank you
Enno

Re: Best way to type arabic in emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Enrico Schwass <ennoausberlin@mac.com>
> Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:39:21 +0100
> Cc: 
> 
> can emacs cvs handle arabic characters?

Yes, but it doesn't yet support bidirectional editing and display.

> So far I can only see single characters.  How can I switch to RTL?

You can't, not just yet.  Work is under way to add support for UAX#9
features, but it is not yet in the repository, and even when it will
be, it's a long way from being complete or even anywhere near that.

Volunteers are welcome to join the effort (followup on
emacs-devel@gnu.org, if you want to volunteer).

Re: Best way to type arabic in emacs

[B. T. Raven]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Enrico Schwass <ennoausberlin@mac.com>
>> Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:39:21 +0100
>> Cc: 
>>
>> can emacs cvs handle arabic characters?
> 
> Yes, but it doesn't yet support bidirectional editing and display.
> 
>> So far I can only see single characters.  How can I switch to RTL?
> 
> You can't, not just yet.  Work is under way to add support for UAX#9
> features, but it is not yet in the repository, and even when it will
> be, it's a long way from being complete or even anywhere near that.
> 
> Volunteers are welcome to join the effort (followup on
> emacs-devel@gnu.org, if you want to volunteer).
> 
> 


An interim toy solution not even amounting to a kludge is to input left
to right using medial forms everywhere and then, using regexes I
suppose, replace medial forms with the correct initial and final forms
before and after spaces. Finally use a linewise reverse-string function
on the whole buffer. Also, maybe in some contexts the stand-alone forms
would be acceptable. Then only string reversal is needed.

I don't know whether the arabic input method has everything you need or
not. (Type C-x ret C-\ arabic.)It would be nice to have an arabic-babel
method (like the Greek-babel one) for non-native Arab language typists.