[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Support for Arabic language

[Ben Shum]

Hi Eva,

I know that in the XUL staff client, if one were to select a
right-to-left language, like Arabic or Hebrew (which are options), it
will change the direction of the client view to appear like it would
work from right to left.  Without too many translated strings or users
though, I am unsure how it would behave with the actual working
interfaces.  I imagine there's work to be done.

And for the web catalog or web staff client, this is also largely unknown to me.

-- Ben

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 11:09 AM, Cerninakova Eva <cernin at jabok.cz> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I had been  contacted by translator from Jordan who is member of the team
> currently translating Evergreen to Arabic. The translators had a few
> questions - one of them was whether Evergreen is capable of dealing with
> Arabic.
>
> I am sure there should not be problem to display Arabic characters in
> Evergreen. However  I have some question about support for Arabic Language
> too:
>
> 1) Is there a support  for  left to right  writing in Evergreen?
> According to a  few informations founded in general Evergreen mailing list,
> information in  dokuwiki  (probably not very up-to-dated)  and my very
> limited knowledge of Evergreen -  I am quite positive the RTL  is currently
> not supported in Evergreen.
>
> I suppose the support for RTL would include:
>
>     RTL dir attribute in html tag in web pages
>     RTL support in CSS
>     Possibility to switch the LTR  to RTL  when user switch from English to
> Arabic language and vice versa in all parts of the interface including print
> outputs, notifications etc.
>     What else?
>
> The translating team have already some experiences in translating  SliMS ILS
> and PMB ILS to Arabic before and they are  capable of creating style
> templates for OPAC but they will probably need some help from the community
> e.g., with the questions how enable the proper style sheet according to
> language selected (RTL for Arabic, LTR for others). I
>
> 2)  Does Evergreen currently include support for Arabic? According to the
> conclusions of the discussion in the general mailing list, which was held in
> June this year
> (https://www.mail-archive.com/open-ils-general@list.georgialibraries.org/msg12491.html),
> I am not sure of it. In every case as Arabic is quite trickier than LTR
> languages, it would be excellent if  support for Arabic language and
> localization had a high priority in following  Evergreen releases in order
> to test the Arabic as quickly as possible.
>
>
> Thank in advance for the information
>
> Eva
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> ---
> Mgr. Eva Cerniňáková
> cernin at jabok.cz
> Tel. +420 211 222 409
>
> Knihovna Jabok
> http:/knihovna.jabok.cz
> Tel.  +420 211 222 410
>
> Jabok - Vyšší odborná škola sociálně pedagogická a teologická
> Salmovská 8, 120 00 Praha 2
>